


Stupid Questions

by Write_like_an_American



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Guardians of the Galaxy - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (not that that needs a separate tag), Bisexual Male Character, Criminal!Yondu, Foe Yay, How They Met, M/M, Masturbation, Nova corps!Kraglin, Prison, References to Knotting, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, cops and robbers, nemeses - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-09-25 21:10:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 35,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9844394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Write_like_an_American/pseuds/Write_like_an_American
Summary: The first rule of being a Nova Officer is Don't Ask Stupid Questions. And Kraglin just broke it.Featuring our two favorite Ravagers as a cop and a criminal, engaged in a perpetual game of cat and mouse. Contains: dark themes, sexual content, violence and lice and everything nice.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **In which Kraglin remembers.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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> Fanart by the magnificent @kogla on tumblr!

 Kraglin didn’t know who brought him in, and he didn’t much care. That was his first mistake.

“Yondu Udonta,” said Saal. How had a guy like Saal wound up in this hellpit? The scion of a noble Nova family whose roots stretched back further than Kraglin’s species, he seemed out of place in a Kyln guard’s uniform. But that was one of the first rules of employment here. You didn’t ask stupid questions.

When Kraglin asked what comprised a stupid question, he’d been put on clean-up duty for a week. That was overkill - he’d learnt his lesson by the end of the first day (by which time he’d already sponged up after three dead bodies and a puddle of glowing goop that was either a biohazardous mucus-ball or spilt dinner). Ever since, he’d copied the wisest prisoners. He kept his head down, bided his time, didn't talk back, and asked strictly no questions.

That name though… It rang a bell. A dusty and small bell, its peals muffled by the cobwebs of memory, but a bell nevertheless.

Kraglin made mistake number two. He broke his cardinal rule.

“Yondu Udonta?” The pair of them were staffing the central tower that overlooked the great panopticon, scouring the camera feeds for any disruptions that might warrant a punch-up or a hearty bout of tasering. Anything to disrupt the dull monotony of the day. “Who the flark’s that?”

“You don’t know?” Saal looked surprised. Then shrugged, as if to say _you’re a lowly Hraxian; I don’t know what I expected_. “Ravager. Not much to look at, but he’s clocked over one hundred Nova kills. Not confirmed, of course, but everyone knows he’s the culprit.”

Kraglin whistled, impressed. Then remembered he was supposed to be horrified. “Ugh. What a monster. Hope he doesn’t survive the week.”

“Mm.” Saal tipped his head consideringly at Yondu’s image. It was one among the hundreds of new weekly intakes he was logging while Kraglin siphoned off the outflow: prisoners who had reached the terminus of their sentences and were released back into the wild, prisoners who’d decided to take the quick way out and ganked themselves, prisoners who’d pissed off Small Fry and been relieved of their favorite organs. “Thought he’d be taller.”

But he flicked past the mugshot before Kraglin could impart his thoughts on the matter, and life went on.

 

* * *

 

He heard the name again that evening. It sent the same thrill through him; a memory lurking under the surface, beyond the scratch of his conscious mind. The voice that spoke it though… Unlike Saal’s drone, this was the guttural grate of Small Fry, self-proclaimed meanest among the Kyln’s top dogs (and the undisputed ugliest).

“Well, well, well! If it ain’t lil’ Yondu. Not so proud now, are ya blue?”

And he was blue, Kraglin saw. Very blue. Those of a more poetic inclination might compare him to the flawless azure of a Xandarian skyline - discounting the scars and the scruffy stubble, of course. And that red hunk of metal, wedged in his skull like a snapped axe-blade.

Kraglin, born on Hrax, where centuries’ worth of pollution from Nova-owned factory facilities made the horizon uniformly grey, disliked blue on principle. He cast a disinterested look at the barrel-shaped bearded man who was sizing Udonta up, grin of the sort that precluded screams from the showerblock and calls for ‘miscellaneous spillage clean-up’: a not especially inventive euphemism for blood. Then shrugged, and went about his business.

Seemed his estimate of a week had been too generous.

 

* * *

 

Only next morning, when Kraglin pressed his internally-wired wristpiece to the buzzer and snapped his stun-baton at the prisoners who didn’t clear the gangway fast enough, Yondu was sat at one of the many metal tables that were bolted to the Kyln’s expansive floor.

Where had Kraglin seen him before? He knew that name, he knew that face. Yondu seemed cowed and quiet, as most wannabe-bigshots were after being crushed beneath the iron fist of Nova law. So why was Kraglin’s gut telling him something was _wrong_ about this picture?

Getting caught staring would only complicate matters. But Kraglin couldn’t help himself. The sense he was missing something prickled him; he picked at it like an old scab.

Yondu minded his own business. He wasn’t an especially large fellow, built a little bulkier than Kraglin but lacking his vertical inches. He didn’t seem capable of exterminating Nova officers in their droves. Slumped over his breakfast bowl, oversized jumpsuit sleeves rolled up his wrists and making lack-of-eye-contact into an art form, he would fade into the background if it weren’t so evident - to Kraglin at least - that that’s what he was trying to do. He didn’t watch the patrolling guards. He didn’t thump his fist down on the end of his spoon and send the glob of protein-mush sailing the length of the table, to start a food-fight or a brawl. He didn’t even strike up casual conversation with the men and women and others packed in on either side of him. That could be because they were all gumming their slops stony-faced, projecting their annoyance at being assigned the first work-shift of the day. Or it could be because Yondu had more than a single braincell to rub.

_Head down. Do your time. Don’t ask questions._

It was a mantra to live by. Which made it all the more amazing that Yondu was still breathing, after what Kraglin had witnessed in the cafeteria last night. He gave the hunched form another once-over. Not because he was in any way concerned, but just to make sure his eyes hadn’t deceived him. Nope. Not a scratch on the guy. At least, no visible ones. Perhaps Small Fry had opted for a more _intimate_ means of showing Yondu who was boss?

Kraglin sniggered. He’d have to call Yondu to the watchtower over some minor infraction or another; see if he limped.

He hadn’t always been this callous. But there was only so much of the galaxy’s griminess one could stomach before they grew numb to it. Having been stationed at the Kyln for six months - which was coincidentally six times longer than the average drop-out rate - and on camera-duty for the past three, Kraglin had faced a choice between waterproofing his hide from the Kyln’s dirty deluge, and drowning in it. Nowadays, it was only the real depravities that sickened him. The stuff involving the younger prisoners; the unreported abuses enacted by the guards; the way Small Fry turned his victims inside out when he got really mad. And even then, Kraglin knew better than to intervene.

So his mirth at Yondu’s assumed ass-ache wasn’t malicious. He had nothing against the guy. Wear the six-pointed star on his chest he may do, but in Kraglin’s opinion a hundred dead Nova operatives was worth a congratulatory drink, not a prison sentence. Smarmy, stuck-up, self-righteous buggers; acting like their Empire was anything but a blight on the free galaxy…

Ugh. He was getting ahead of himself. Kraglin was just here to make an easy mint. He’d left all thoughts of revolution behind him a long time ago.

He was eighteen now, although his stats claimed he had two years on that. It felt like more of a milestone than it was. He was the age he’d pretended to be when he first kissed a grubby ring in a grubbier Hraxian market and swore himself to the service of the Prime. When you needed men for soldiers, a few hungry boys would always slip through the net. And one gangly, skinny Hraxian, tall for his age and old beyond his years, slipped easier than if he’d been greased.

But while he was a military man, Kraglin had far from a military mien. He grew out his ratty beard and ignored Nova uniform regulations and clipped his hair into a raggedy scarecrow of a mohawk every fortnight. He sneered at his commanding officers, never polished his belt buckles, and the majority of his work-regimen consisted of propping his boots on whatever desk he’d been assigned to and lighting a foul-smelling Hraxian cheroot. This he’d puff until his weaselly face turned cherry from the smoke, and everyone whose lungs weren’t accustomed to an atmosphere that was ninety-percent particulate was either asphyxiating or unconscious.

Really, there was little wonder he’d been sent to the Kyln after basic. In another life, he’d been a criminal. It was only circumstance that put him on this side of the desk.

Kraglin didn’t like the Corps much, but a job was a job. He lived his life day-in, day-out, slacking where he could and skulking grouchily through his tasks where he couldn’t. He tried not to be overly cruel to the prisoners - not like some of the guards, who’d only been stationed here to avoid spending taxpayers’ money on psych evals. But he was careful not to be lenient either. Let these prisoners take an inch, they took a lightyear - and before you knew it, you had a riot on your hands.

There was no such excitement today. Kraglin was almost disappointed.

His shift had been long and dreary. At the end of it though, Kraglin could kick his door shut, pop his pants, and get friendly with Mr Right - as was customary during midweek off-hours, when the choices of leisure activity were restricted to private time, exercise, or eavesdropping on the state-sanctioned nightly Prisoner Enrichment Session. (Tonight’s focus was poetry. While Kraglin didn’t quail at sponging up diced prisoners who’d ‘accidentally’ taken a misstep into the kitchen’s industrial-sized food blender, listening to a bunch of crooks bewailing the supposed injustice of their capture through haiku might tip him over the edge.)

He groaned when he cranked the lid of his lube-pot and saw the bottom. All friction was good friction, but Kraglin had too many gun callouses to make fucking his fist comfortable without slick of some sort. Plus, his mind kept wandering to the new guy. It did this unbidden, and Kraglin chastised it severely. But before he could fixate on tittier masturbation-material, his runaway brain decided to hijack this session entirely and deliver a picture of what Small Fry might have done to make Yondu so subdued.

Kraglin shuddered. He bade farewell to yet another orgasm-never-achieved.

It was none of his business, he reminded himself. So what if the guy was a certified badass, judging by his record? So what if, despite his jokes on the subject, the thought of what went on in the lowest showerblock made him queasy to his stomach? Worse things happened to better people. But Kraglin also knew, with the niggling certitude of a man just beginning to understand his own drives and impulses, that his curiosity had been piqued. There was something so _familiar_ about Yondu, something he felt a perpetual second away from placing….

It clicked. 

“Fuck,” Kraglin breathed, eyes so wide they stood out of his skull, white as his bloodless face. “ _Fuck._ It’s him.”

Because Kraglin’s initiation into the Nova ranks hadn’t gone smoothly. On his maiden voyage, flying from Hrax to Xandar to receive his commission, his formation had been accosted. And not by just anyone.

Ravagers. Scourge of the skies.

Their schooner was slow-moving, but a veritable fortress compared to the Nova ships. When their cannons fired, the flash was so bright it blotted out the distant nebula. They’d blasted most Novacraft apart mid-space - but Kraglin’s unremarkable rookie-pod had squirrelled away in the debris. He would have gotten away if he hadn’t toggled the headlights in his panic, causing a bright beam of white to slice the dark and illuminate an exploded diagram of Nova ships: coils and engine rods bulging grotesquely from their shells, the bodies of the pilots floating behind cracked glass, their faces contorted in petrified, ice-crusted screams.

Kraglin had screamed too. Then again, as the traction beam locked on and his pod was slurped into the M-shuttle’s hangar.

The pirates were a bestial bunch. But they weren’t complete savages, and they liked their hostages wealthy and their meat tender. They’d pinched the scant flab under Kraglin’s arms, turned up their noses, and declared him useless for sauteing and ransom alike.

“What did I ever do to you?” Kraglin remembered shouting, as they flipped a unit-chip to determine whether he’d be snipped up for stew anyway or fed to the abyss. “Why are you doing this?”

He’d be disgusted at himself later, because he’d never sounded so stupid or so naive. The boss of the small warband was well within his rights to laugh. And laugh he had, loudly and heartily, tipping his head back all the way so Kraglin saw where teeth lost in fistfights and firefights and all fights in between had been replaced with chipped silver.

“Cause we _can_ , idjit,” had been his reply.

It was the sort of story every Nova Corpsman had. They waved it around at parties when they wanted a free drink, but otherwise kept it stowed under their belts, where trauma belonged. Where Kraglin’s tale differed was that the garrison hadn’t flown to his rescue. He wasn’t important enough for that - hadn’t even got a uniform yet. Rather, the boss had taken disposal into his own hands. He’d made Kraglin march ahead of him to the airlock with a whistle-controlled weapon, one of a sort Kraglin had never laid eyes on before. It jabbed his hairy nape whenever he dug in his heels. The creeping cold of the void felt as if it had already infected him, freezing him from the inside out. He could see his new compatriots outside the porthole, their cadavers cartwheeling from the force with which their ships had been blasted apart. They spread out in every direction, like the percussive waves of an explosion in slow-mo. And Kraglin was about to join them.

Kraglin, sixteen and terrified, did the only thing he could. He clung to the airlock. The boss painstakingly scraped his fingers from the doorframe - heaven knew why; losing digits would be the last of Kraglin’s worries if he were exposed. It was at that final moment of contact, Kraglin gripping the hand the captain had used to pry him loose in sweaty deathclutch, that he’d looked up. And met odd pink eyes, belonging to a man not five years his senior.

“Aw flark,” Yondu’d said. “Yer just a kid.”

There’d been no time for reparations, or for Kraglin - hotheaded in spite of impending death - to pull himself to his full, not inconsiderable height and deny it (or, worse yet, say ‘so are you’). The crew had rounded the corner, in time to watch Yondu punch the eject sequence and send their pesky captive spiralling through the heat-wobble of the M-shuttle’s backburners.

What they hadn’t realized was that Yondu was missing a space-helmet capsule from behind his ear. And that while Kraglin was marooned and without any means of propulsion to his name, he at least had a limitless supply of oxygen, and a forcefield that reflected as much of his body’s warmth internally as it allowed to escape: an externalized homeostasis that regulated his temperature in the vacuum.

The regiment’s worry-hour had been and gone. It had taken the Nova corps a day to locate their soldiers, fifteen dead and one alive. That meant twenty four gruelling hours spent floating alone, encased in absolute silence bar the pound of blood through his brain. Twenty-four hours of wondering whether he might as well unclip the spacemask now, rather than languish in bleak black limbo until he died of dehydration. When he’d first seen the glimmer of a Nova ship, streaking through the endless dark like the shooting star its design emulated, he’d been unsure whether he was being rescued or if delirium was setting in.

No wonder Kraglin buried that memory so deep. But now he’d dredged it up, it was agonizingly clear. He could hear the piercing tone of Yondu’s whistle, see each Ravager’s silhouette in sharp relief, and smell the rich bouquet of old leather, engine oil, testosterone, and body odor as it mingled with his own sour fear. Kraglin shuddered, bringing himself back to his poky cabin. One thing was for sure. The laughing madman who’d rained a volley of fire onto a passing Nova troop for the sheer hell of it wouldn’t be perched on his allocated bench, eating his breakfast in mechanical scoops.

“He’s playing us,” Kraglin breathed. “Flark.” Then he grabbed his stun-baton holster, clumsily strapped it around his waist, and sprinted out the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Feel free to leave comments anywhere, anytime. I love them all.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **In which Saal is disgusted, Yondu is cheeky, and Kraglin is too smart for his own good.**

“You're off shift,” Saal observed. His mouth thinned to a disgusted line. “And your fly is down, Obfonteri.”

Shit. No time to delay though. Neglecting his exposed tackle in favor of the problem at hand, Kraglin grabbed Saal’s shoulders and pushed his harried face so close that Saal could see the popped capillaries in his eyes. “Udonta! The tapes, from when he was in the shower with Small Fry! Where are they?”

Saal discretely toed his chair away. He sneered at the hands on his shoulders as if they were black with leprosy. “If you allowed me to return to my station, I would be able to show you.”

Chastened, Kraglin took his customary seat. He jiggled his feet, almost snapping at Saal - who was spending far too long scrolling through extraneous camera material, stuff he could filter with a simple search. ‘Let me-’ he started.

The look Saal leveled at him could bring Accusers to their knees. Kraglin, significantly weaker, scrawnier, sallower, and less durable, had no chance. He withered in his seat, chin hitting chest, and was silent.

Time stretched in proportion to Kraglin’s growing impatience. At long last, Saal located the clip. “Here,” he said, swiping it onto a palm held data device and shoving it against Kraglin’s chest. Kraglin was treated with similar brusqueness: conveyed out the door in the most clinical frogmarch of his life, Saal striving to touch as little of him as possible. “You may jerk off to this in your own free time, rather than continuing to waste mine. Honestly, Kraglin. I thought you were different.”

“I wasn’t gonna...” The door whooshed shut, a gust of recycled air slapping his stubbled cheek. Kraglin turned his protest into a scoff. So much for salvaging his rep. Or his working relationship with that one. Oh well - Saal’d be promoted out of this pit soon enough, and then Kraglin never had to share space with the smarmy git again. Really, Kraglin thought, zipping up with a loud rasp and shooting emphatic middle fingers at the doorcam for Saal to receive during his morning footage review, sometimes he wondered why he’d joined up in the first place. Sure, it beat starving in the Hraxian gutter. But there were other options out there, even if they were sub-legal. As a Nova Corpsman, if he wasn’t bowing and scraping to superior officers he had to work with cunts like Saal: men who thought having their heritage commemorated in the history discs at the Xandarian archive; the ones which were stashed in adamantium-lined cases to protect them from vandals, thieves, or Kree annihilation; made them _special._

Kraglin hated guys like that.

“I hate guys like that,” said Yondu.

Kraglin span around, data pad held between them like a shield. Then he remembered what was on that pad, and hid it behind his back instead. “Prisoner,” he barked. His tone wasn’t nearly as authoritarian as he would have liked - more squeaky, if he was being honest. “Get off the bridge. This area is restricted - guards only.”

“My bad, my bad…” Yondu jumped from the balustrade, where he’d been sitting and kicking his feet like a kid on a summery meadow stile - as opposed to a mass-murdering lunatic in a maximum security galactic-class jail. He fell into step besides him, craning none-too-subtly at Kraglin’s data pad. “M’kinda new here. Got lost lookin’ for the loo. Think ya could point me in the right direction?”

Yeah, Kraglin wouldn’t trust that innocent face if it were blinking at him from a baby’s pram. He tapped his truncheon. “Step back, prisoner.”

“Or what? You’ll shove me out the airlock?”

Shit.

Yondu’s grin crept out of hiding as Kraglin failed to come up with anything approaching a scathing comeback. “Think of this as a warnin’, kiddo. You ain’t young enough to go making sad boo-boo eyes at me no more. Next time you get in the way, I kill you.”

Kraglin’s mouth opened and shut. He meant to scold him for insolence. An ultimatum like that gave him the right to smack the smirk from Yondu’s mug with an electrified truncheon - and for any other prisoner, on any other day, Kraglin would have capitalized on it. But by the time his fumbling fingers found the activation panel, Yondu had leaned back, satisfied that his threat had hit the mark. He made to stroll off the bridge, not bothering to look over his shoulder as green lightning snapped and flashed around the black metal rod. He raised one hand as if in farewell. “It’d be a shame, y’know. For a Hraxian, yer kinda cute.”

That was _it._ Kraglin snarled and lunged. He caught Yondu square between the shoulderblades - a coward’s move, but more fool the Ravager for assuming Kraglin was above such tactics just because of the sigil on his chest.

Muscle pulled taught. Yondu juddered like his very atoms were vibrating apart before pitching forwards, a high feeble noise escaping his throat as he fell. Kraglin, panting over his body, let himself smile. Then abruptly scowled when he realized that note wasn’t hiccuping with pain, but laughter.

He’d just tazed him, and Yondu was _laughing._

Fuck this freak. Kraglin stepped over him, treading on his singed back, tape clasped securely in his hands. He was going to disrupt whatever con Yondu was pulling if it was the last thing he did.

* * *

He stayed up to watch the tape. Its contents weren’t the most riveting, but Kraglin forced his eyes open, swallowing yawns and pinching himself when he started to nod. He’d be a dead-eyed zombie come the morning - but he was on stock rotation, so that was per-the-course.

The camera covered the entirety of the showers. Rather than selecting footage with finesse, Saal had hacked off a whole wadge, no doubt to get Kraglin out of his hair. A-hole. Didn’t he realize Kraglin was doing this out of his solemn-sworn duty to the Nova star? Kraglin had discovered a plot, he was sure of it - even if he had no evidence bar Yondu’s attitude. If he couldn’t take it to his superiors, he’d unearth it himself, reap all the glory, and maybe get Yondu’s sentence upped by long enough that he would be too old to put Kraglin on his hitlist by the time he got out.

 _Yeah,_ taunted the little voice that Kraglin thought might be his conscience. _Like you’re doing this for the Nova Corps. Like this ain’t personal._

Kraglin set his jaw and scrolled through another five minutes, watching for the raw-dough like lump of Small Fry’s belly through the steam. Then froze it. _Blue._ There.

Discussions were being had. Yondu stood far too cockily for someone of his size, smirking like he had everything under control. It was an excellent impression. Kraglin would be convinced, if he didn’t know Small Fry ate uppity things like Udonta for breakfast. (Sometimes literally. Nothing had ever been proven, but they’d only found that wannabe-usurper’s bones, and Kraglin had his suspicions about where the rest of him had gotten to.) Balancing the data pad on his crossed ankles, Kraglin plonked his chin on his hand and stared at the screen until his vision fluxed and the vibrant blue of Yondu’s form wavered in and out of the misty vapors like a mirage. What were they saying? He wasn’t the best lip-reader, but at least both parties were speaking Xandarian. It only took five rewinds, camera zoomed on their lips, for him to get the gist.

 _Tomorrow,_ Yondu said. _Do it tomorrow night. Or you can forget my cap’n - you’ll be facing me._

Small Fry seemed less than impressed. _Oh yeah? What are you, Udonta, without yer arrow?_ A pudgy hand descended on Yondu’s implant, bestowing a mocking pat. _I could do whatever I wanted to that cute blue ass of yours, an’ there ain’t no one who’d be able to stop me. Least of all you._

A worse person might have brought popcorn. Kraglin just hovered over the skip button, cringing so low his collar scraped his cheeks and wishing he could get the nasty parts over with without missing something of potential import.

Only somehow, against all odds, Yondu salvaged the situation. He stepped closer. Treated Small Fry to a grin that would’ve looked saccharine, even coquettish, on someone with better dental hygiene. His bare torso brushed the rolls of Small Fry’s side. Small Fry smiled greasily. He made to tuck an arm around his waist, heave him in until he was floundering in shower-slicked blubber. But Yondu evaded, snatching Small Fry by the ear and yanking his head down to his level instead.

What he whispered in that ear was lost; his back turned on the camera’s overhead fishbubble. But then lens did capture how the furious puce drained from Small Fry’s face, and how rather than grabbing Yondu’s torso in one meaty fist and squeezing until it popped, his arms flopped lifeless to his side. He stood there meekly as Yondu finished his hushed message. They were alone in the place. Stars knew why he felt the need to whisper - probably for panache.  

Kraglin snorted into his palm. Always the flarking showman. But he couldn’t help the little tic at the corner of his mouth, so slight he could’ve blamed it on an itch if he’d had an audience, as Yondu cheerfully patted Small Fry’s whiskered cheek and released him, the larger man scrambling to the other side of the box-shaped room and almost losing his footing on the slippery tiles.

Kraglin considered switching off the data pad when Small Fry scuttled from the showerblock. He had everything he needed. Something was going down tonight - and he was gonna be on the front lines of the opposition. But he couldn’t wrench his gaze away. Maybe it was because Yondu was, as most visitors to the showerblock tended to be (whether against their will or otherwise) buck naked. And like it or not, an eighteen year old had certain _needs._ But personally, Kraglin blamed it on the fact he was looking straight at him.

Well, not at him. At the camera. The telescopic eye whirred his face into focus, just in time for Yondu to blow it a kiss.

* * *

Kraglin popped three soldier pills, maximum recommended dose. He swallowed them one after the other, dry-throated, and washed them down with a metallic-tasting swig from his faucet. He had to be alert. He couldn’t nod off, not when all hell could be about to erupt…

On cue, the overhead alarm screeched to life.

Kraglin clapped his hands to his ears. The lights flared ruby, dousing the room in blood. He held his crouch until his hearing adjusted, filtering the bone-rattling sirens. Well, if he hadn’t already been awake, he would be now.

He was the first off his block to join the pounding feet in the corridors, as guards amassed from all four corners of the prison. “What’s going on?” he panted to the man jogging besides him: some ugly pinecone-headed purple critter from the outworlds, his body compressed into the largest issue-size uniform with difficulty. He received a grunt and a glower in return - and winced, because what was it with him and asking stupid questions today? But rather than a punch, that glare was followed by a half-snarled reply.

“Boss says it’s that fat cunt Small Fry, causing a right ruckus. Seems ready to start a riot.”

 _Tomorrow night._ Yondu had said that yesterday. Kraglin halted, abrupt enough that the guard behind him rammed into his back. “Watch where you’re stopping, idiot!”

Kraglin bore the shove with good grace. “This’s a diversion,” he breathed. The woman elbowed her way past, scowling over her shoulder.

“Kid, you wanna call it that and go back to bed, be my guest. Just don’t come crying when you get court-martialled in the morning. And for fuck’s sake, get out the way.”

The corridors encased the main prison-hall in a steel sailor’s knot, like the arteries around a mechanical heart. Usually sparsely populated, they looked unrecognizable when heaving with troops. Officers marshalled soldiers down different halves of a fork, one side of the corridor rising towards the armory, the other descending to the panopticon’s hefty blast doors, which would be reeled open once any attempted ambushes had been dispersed with the aid of pressure hoses and electricity.

It wasn’t half as chaotic as it looked. The prisoners rioted whenever the cafeteria ran out of jelly worms - albeit rather dispassionately. When you had no structure of law, no legitimate means of complaint, violence was all you could turn to. (Kraglin had been raised Hraxian, where anti-imperial protests left smashed glass and shrapnel littering the streets and bodies mulching in the gutter. He knew this better than most.) The Kyln guards dealt with such nonsense on a biweekly basis. They’d crush this upheaval, like they’d crushed all upheavals before.

Nodding as the woman pounded ahead, muscular shoulders crowding in on space reserved for her head, Kraglin made an executive decision and did as he was told.

* * *

The archivist received the vid-files following Kraglin and Saal’s morning review, and sorted them into their appropriate logs. She wasn’t an active operative, and thus wouldn’t be taking part in the riot-stomping. Kraglin figured that left her free for a social visit.

He skulked through deserted passageways, ears straining for the thump of guards’ boots, the hoarse yell of a superior ordering him to join the stampede. Last thing he wanted was to be accused of cowardice. Not that this prevented the Archivist from making up her mind on the matter, as Kraglin snuck into her office and sealed the door behind him.

‘What are you doing here?’ she hissed. Her beefy face was rank with sweat. She tugged at her collar, throat bulging over its rim, a greasy ring of fat. “You're not supposed to be here.”

Must be a temp. Kraglin looked at her with pity. “This yer first riot?”

Her face was the color of semolina. “No!”

Liar. But Kraglin could lie too, and his tells weren’t nearly so obvious. “The warden requires information on Convict 51692,” he said, standing to a shoddy attention and resisting the urge to yawn, scratch his balls, or do any other such thing that might be perceived as unprofessional. “Seems to think he’s got something to do with all this fuss.” A waved hand collated the flashing lights, the repeat of _all armed guards to the central panopticon_ from the tannoy, the muffled blare of alarms. “Name’s… Yandude Udoughnut, or somethin’.”

The Archivist, scared though she might have been, found solace in her work. The tremble in her pasty fingers receded as they swiped through ream after ream of holographic data bundles, shuffling them from folder to folder until she located a file that corresponded to Yondu’s designated number. “Here,” she said, voice almost lost beneath the sirens. “What does he need to know?”

Kraglin hadn’t thought this far ahead. “Uh… Recap’d be good. How did they catch this guy, anyway?”

The Archivist twiddled the three-dimensional cube of Xandarian sigils in front of her face, gleaning information from all sides. She was wearing a holo-light manipulation glove; the pad of each finger glowed gold, ripples spreading from where they came into contact with the cube's translucent surface. “He posted a picture on the infonet. Some stupid bragging selfie with his M-ship dash. Gave us enough proof to nail him on speeding and star-road tax evasion.” Go figure. If they couldn’t pin the bad guys on murder, the Nova Corps would work diligently to swamp them in so much bureaucratic nonsense that they’d be tempted to turn themselves in to avoid the slew of summonses over everything from Public Indecency to Jaywalking. If Yondu had shoplifted so much as a grape, his freedom would’ve been forfeit.

Kraglin squinted at the cube, trying to make sense of the squiggles. They moved too quick to see, and it wasn’t like he was the fastest reader anyway. That’s what you got for starting your edumacation at sixteen. “But how did we bring him in? I’ve uh, heard rumours is all. This guy’s said to be vicious.”

Another finger-motion; another twiddle. Kraglin was starting to get dizzy. “Hm. Looks like it was by force. A leak close to him had revealed that his arrow could be disarmed if isolated in adamantium, so we… uh. Sent in a rookie regiment armed with boxes.” Eek. Her voice trailed off. But when she noticed Kraglin’s expression - disgusted, mutinous, far from surprised - she spoke up again, this time in defence. “This guy’s killed over a hundred of our own! Any measures were deemed necessary…”

Kraglin folded his arms. “He murders a hundred men so we send in some more for him to off?”

“The fatality rate was surprisingly low, given what we know of Udonta.” She set her chin in something approaching determination. “And it worked. The pay-off was worth the collateral damage.’

Huh. Kraglin bet those rookie officers were all nobodies like him, pulled into service from grotty bottom-feeding planets that’d been industrialized in the first great colonization wave. Becoming cannon-fodder had been an improvement. At least they’d been well-fed before being sent out to die. And, as not many _had_ died, Kraglin would put money on most of them being young.

For a moment, he swore he felt cool blue fingers clipping a spacemask to the back of his ear.

“‘And where did this leak come from?” he asked, mostly to distract himself. The Archivist nodded like she’d won the argument and dipped into the glittering display once again. Holopixels swam around her gloves as she located the required braid of data and teased it to the surface. She planted her fingers side by side, pressing until the holocrystals registered her touch and flared gold. Then dragged swiftly apart to unzip the file and maximize the data to the point of visibility.

“A source close to him. Like I said.”

“Did this source have a name?”

“Uh… let me see. Lich... Mib... Hm. Lich Mibloo Yass-hawl?” A pause, while that soaked in. “Okay. It sounds worse when you say it out loud.”

“I’ll say,” growled Kraglin. He’d heard enough. Patting his truncheon to reassure himself it was still attached to his utility belt, he turned on his heel, narrow shoulders hunched. One thing was for certain. The only reason Yondu was here was because he wanted to be.

* * *

It took Kraglin all of five minutes to discover why. Coincidentally, that was also the time it took for him to reach the storage lockers and locate Yondu’s box.

It was nondescript, one among a thousand. Its contents were no more revealing than the exterior decor. No treasure maps. Nothing personal at all, bar that wine-red coat and a few shiny baubles, the sort of tchotchke you could pick up cheap at any tourist market from here to Knowhere. Their presence was incongruous, but not inexplicable. The officers in charge of confiscating Yondu’s possessions must’ve muddled them in with someone else’s by mistake.

Moving fast but careful Kraglin lifted the coat, catching a whiff of raw Ravager. Leather. Ship fuel. Plasma. Touching the material, creased as it was from days spent bundled in this box, felt sacrilegious, like he was catching a forbidden glimpse of himself in another life. Kraglin stroked the flame patch. His fingers lingered with something he refused to call reverence.

He didn’t regret choosing the Nova corps over the Ravagers. Not one bit.

Sure, every boy at some point in their lives wanted to become a space pirate. But this right here was proof for why childhood dreams oughta stay just that: fantasies, buried in the past. Kraglin was the one in the uniform, Yondu the one behind bars. Kraglin was the one rummaging through Yondu’s personal effects, Yondu was the one whose arrow had apparently bored its way out of the long, slim, and purportedly unbreakable box it’d been stowed in, drilling through the base of the trunk and out the other side, leaving a singed hole in the piping that receded into infinity, its edges cauterized from the intensity of the heat.

Kraglin was the one on his knees with that same radioactive fire prodding the back of his neck. Yondu leaned on the wall behind, munching something pilfered from the kitchens and whistling in between bites. His prison jumpsuit had been stuffed beneath a better-fitting guard’s uniform; yellow fabric bunched around the sleeves.

“Hey kid,” he said.

Kraglin folded the coat. He drew out the motions, making each one slow and purposeful, both to perform his lack of a weapon and savor every second of the minute it took, as it was likely to be his last. Once no amount of patting would further smooth the leather, Kraglin laid it on top the perforated box. He closed the trunk’s lid: a hollowed out trapezioid that, when shut, turned the case into an octagonal cylinder. It looked disconcertingly similar to the vacuum-degradable coffins that Nova soldiers’ ashes were poured into before they were dedicated to the void. “Not a kid anymore.”

“Really?” Yondu crunched noisily. Kraglin contemplated making a break for it while his mouth was full, but he wasn’t convinced that this would prevent Yondu from whistling. And if the arrow didn’t clatter to the floor whenever he chomped down, who knew if it was self-propelled? “Coulda fooled me. Cause this right here’s the sorta stupid shit a kid does.”

Kraglin swallowed. He could feel every heartbeat, a throb that resounded around his brain. Sweat crept through the dense jungle of hair on his back. “Damn. An’ here was me thinkin’ I was a right smartass for figuring you out.”

Yondu’s chuckle sounded genuine - riddled as it was with _ptoos_ as he spat seeds to clatter off the locker rack besides Kraglin’s head. “Smartass ain’t far off the mark.”

As Kraglin was gonna die anyway, he didn’t see the harm in asking: “What did you say to Small Fry? To make him so scared of ya?”

Yondu’s shadow bobbed as he nodded to the trunk, within which the useless arrow-box lay. Kraglin wondered if he’d cram his body in there with it once he’d done with him; let the trunk act as the tomb it resembled. “I simply mentioned that just cause a juicy tidbit ‘bout my arrow was grindin’ through the gossip mill, it don’t mean it’s necessarily true.” Pause. “And told him that I was here on business, not pleasure, so if he or his cock got in my way I’d make ‘em both shorter by a head.”

Kraglin winced. “And where,” he said hoarsely, trying not to tremble as the arrow tip revolved in a torturous circle, “is Small Fry now?”

Yondu stepped into his line of sight and exaggeratedly cocked an ear. The sirens had cut off some minutes back - the riot must’ve been quelled. That made it all the easier to hear the scream. “That’ll be him. Big guy pissed off the Warden one time too many.”

“So you crashed the Kyln to... What? Assassinate him?”

Yondu scoffed. “Don’t be dumb; it don’t suit ya. 'Fry ain’t worth this effort.”

“Whaddaya mean it don’t suit me? I thought I was just another stupid brat.”

The arrow twisted a millimeter forwards, relentless as a drill bit. The pressure on Kraglin’s cervical vertebrae increased exponentially, forcing him up on his knees. Oh yeah. Probably a bad idea to backtalk the a-hole who had a weapon poised to skewer his neck. But Yondu didn’t lose patience and end it. He laughed instead - gravellier and nastier than before, a smoky sound that erupted from deep within his chest. And fuck the stars themselves, because all Kraglin could think was that he knew what noise he’d be imagining next time he was left alone with Mr Right.

...If he and Mr Right ever got another chance to be acquainted.

Kraglin grasped a glimmer of hope when Yondu crossed in front of him, dropping into a low feral squat at the opposite end of the casket. The box between them wasn’t nearly large enough - a nine-foot wall of lead would be better. Not that that’d _protect_ Kraglin necessarily, but it’d sure make him feel better. “If you ain’t stupid, why don’t’cha prove it to me? Tell me what I’m doing. What’s my next play?”

Kraglin wracked his brains, licking dry lips. His fists balled on his thighs. His uniform - too big around the waist and shoulders, too short for optimum wrist and ankle coverage - scrunched into steep-sided aretes, spreading out from the centerpoint of his jacket zip like fractures around a crack. “Small Fry’s a distraction,” he hazarded. He found nothing in those sharp pink eyes but amusement. The arrow had yet to puncture skin though, so Kraglin must be on the right track. Taking a breath that sounded more collected than he was, he continued. “We’re all lookin’ at him, no one notices you sneaking away. But you wouldn’t break into the Kyln just to break out again. You’ve got a bigger game.”

Yondu’s smile became decidedly sharkish. Or that’s how Kraglin might describe it, if he knew what a shark was. Personally, it reminded him of stories from when he first joined the Corps, tales of vast inter-dimensional beings with mouths that never shut, who trawled the empty tracts between galaxies. Things of a thousand interlocking angles that weren’t quite compatible with Euclidean geometry, and which drove you mad if you looked at them for too long. Things that occasionally dangled a light in the darkness to lure ships from their course. “Want a clue?”

Kraglin fought the urge to quiver. “If ya wouldn’t mind.”

“You know anythin’ about bilgesnipe?”

The non-sequitur had Kraglin’s forehead bunching. “Um.”

“Because y’see,” Yondu said, hands clasped loosely and elbows settled on his knees, rocking his heels to rest more comfortably on the ground, like he didn't plan on leaving any time soon. “A bilgesnipe’s just about the nastiest critter there is. Tusks to gore ya, fangs to bite ya, venom to paralyse ya while it crushes ya beneath its fat armored ass. With me so far?”

He had no idea how this analogy related to whatever Yondu was plotting, but suspected he’d soon find out. And anyway, a minute spent talking was another minute left alive. Kraglin nodded.

“Uh-huh. But they ain’t the ones who have a Galactic Empire spanning five hundred-odd populated systems and a whole bunch more outlyin’ colonies. Why’s that?”

Kraglin had to suck moisture from his cheeks before he could reply. “Because they’re stupid.”

The light emitted by the solar panels beneath their feet made Yondu look downright ghoulish. Shadows pooled in his deep-seated eyesockets, their faint red bioluminescence more noticeable than ever. “S’right. They’re animals. Brain the size of a _teku-_ nut. So why’ve the Xandarians done so well in comparison then?”

“Because they’re smart?”

“Technically, smartest species in the galaxy are the Ancients. But they don’t feel the need to build Empires. So again - why the Nova Corps?”

That’s easy. Kraglin recited the words that’d been drummed into him during basic, with threats of endless push-up sets to really make them stick. “Honor, duty, morality. The Nova Corps bring justice to an uncivilized galaxy.” It felt weird, saying such things as if he believed them, and as if he was trying to convince someone else of the same. Yondu’s grin confirmed that he ought to brush up on his acting.

“Nah, that's yer CO talking. But if I ain’t gettin’ nothing out of ya, I might as well just tell you. Kid, the Nova Corps are where they are because they’re _greedy._ Like me. They want more, so they went out and got it, and fucked all you - Hraxian, ain’tcha?”

Kraglin nodded.

“They fucked Hrax and Morag and all you other lesser-planets up the nasty-chute along the way. Oh, they gave you sweettalk. They gave ya politics and press conferences and _diplomacy,_ before they sent their ships and sunk their flag into your soil an’ called you theirs. But they didn’t live up to it. Difference between them an’ my kind? We don’t pretend to be nothing we ain’t.”

Kraglin considered this new information. He timidly raised his hand. “Uh, so you’re saying you wouldn’t give me no meaningless nothings before you fucked me up my nasty chute?”

“I -” Yondu actually looked taken aback. Then he rolled with it, breaking into a chesty laugh that made warmth infiltrate the adrenaline that had turned Kraglin’s legs to useless chunks of jello. The arrow was still at his neck. But he couldn’t feel the heat so much anymore. Either it had irradiated his nerve endings past the point of reporting damage, or Yondu was holding back. “Hypothetically. I mean, if we’re takin’ this the whole way, then personal preference’d be shoving you on yer back and ridin’ ya til you beg.”

By the stars. Mr Right was gonna need a sling to recuperate in after Kraglin had finished with him.

“Do I get a safeword?” And dammit, but what was he doing? Why was he _flirting_ with the convicted criminal who’d tossed him out an airlock at sixteen, butchered one hundred-plus Nova Corpsmen since, and enacted a prison break right before his eyes? Self-preservation, Kraglin told himself, struggling to keep a straight face as Yondu cackled and reached over the trunk to ruffle his mohawk. That’s all this was. Make himself out to be a _person,_ with feelings and thoughts and sentiments, and he’d be harder to kill.

But the satisfaction that coiled inside him from knowing he’d made Yondu laugh, suggested an ulterior motive.  

“What m’saying,” Yondu continued, steering back in the general direction of a topic, “is that it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and I ain’t nobody’s bitch. The Nova Corps have had it too good too long, and there’s those that’re sick of it. Those that want change.”

“Those like you?”

Yondu shook his head, showing off how much metal his grin was composed of. “I’m just a businessman. In it for the money.”

 _So’m I,_ Kraglin wanted to insist. _You think I run with these a-holes because I like ‘em?_ But he reminded himself that he wasn’t looking for Yondu’s approval, and shut his mouth before any rogue words spilled out of it.

Yondu cast him an amused look. He popped the top off the case and flexed onto his feet, languid as a stretching panther. Kraglin remained crouched with the arrow twizzling against his collar. He could only watch as Yondu mussed up his folding-job, checking his coat for rips before shoving it back in without a care for tidiness, then - inexplicably - began to inspect the baubles too, turning them over and over in broad blue hands, and holding them up to squint at against the light. “They’re yours?”

“Well, yeah.” Kraglin’s outburst made a hairless brow edge its way up Yondu’s forehead. It was weird, how he grew stubble on his chin but not over the rest of his crown, where that crystal wedge nestled in scar-webbed skin. Kraglin wondered whether he’d find hair if he unzipped his fly - then abruptly contemplated the merits of dashing his brains out on the rim of the trunk before Yondu had the chance to whistle. “Whose else’d they be?”

No real answer to that. But Kraglin had just realized something. “Hey. You never actually told me why ya got yourself arrested.”

“Yeah,” grunted Yondu, testing whether he was wearing too many layers to shove his arms into his overcoat. When he discovered he was, he discarded the plated guard jacket and pulled the coat over his yellow overalls. There was something amusing about it peeking out, garish beneath all that oiled red leather - but Kraglin knew better than to giggle. “S’called deflection, darlin’. One of those neat lil’ tricks us Ravagers excel at.”

“Other than stealing, and murder?”

“Technically, if ya ignore the whole legalized-colonization crud, the Nova Corps did plenty of that too.”

Touche. Kraglin grit his teeth, irritated that Yondu was saying so much of what had crossed his own mind but which Kraglin had never had the platform, or the opportunity, to share. He wished he had better ammunition to refute him with. But fact of the matter was, he _agreed_ with him… On all subjects but one.

“So what? As if the Ravagers are any better! You _eat people._ ”

“Aw, you still pissed off about that?” Yondu gave him a quick once-over, grin flashing as he strapped his arrow harness into place and heaped trinkets into every pocket. “Don’t worry. Still ain’t enough of you to make casserole.”

Greasy fingers pinching his bicep. His hollow stomach being prodded, his cheeks being squeezed, and the Yondu-of-two-years-back cackling in the background while his men fondled Kraglin all over in search of edible meat.

Playtime was over. Kraglin scowled. “No more messin’. What are you planning, Udonta?”

And why did he have to enter the Kyln to set it in motion? Having emptied the case of all but the busted arrow-box (this was assessed for five whole seconds, Yondu rubbing his stubbled chin, before he determined it was too big to fit in his pocket) Yondu did up the belt that pinned his coat over his chest. Funny, how that single motion made him grow a foot. Within a second, he’d transformed from prisoner to Ravager. You could still see the yellow jumpsuit; the change was more in the way Yondu held himself. This right here was a space pirate. Unlike the menacing-if-jovial personality he’d boasted before - and much to Kraglin’s consternation - he no longer looked like the sort of guy who spared lives on a whim.

Kraglin had pushed him this far though. He’d never forgive himself if he didn’t probe a little further.

“You came here because there was something your cap’n wanted,” he said, recalling the words he’d lipread from the security footage. “Not something physical, like a key. But…”

Yondu whistled. Kraglin threw himself forwards. The arrow didn’t sail overhead as he’d hoped. It stayed pinned to his neck, skin parting around the tip. A bead of blood trailed his skin like a damp feather, following the tendon in his neck. It was so warm he could barely tell the difference between it being outside or inside his body. Kraglin lay face-down on the empty casket, arrow preventing him from raising his head by so much as an inch. It was as if he was genuflecting, prostrating himself before Yondu - but Kraglin made any chance he had to sponge his way out of this redundant.

“Something like a password,” he continued through gritted teeth. “Or a location. Or a -”

“Not one more word,” said Yondu quietly. “Or I ain’t got no excuse for not ending it.”

That was motivation if he’d ever heard it. Kraglin, neck stinging, face crimson, hands and body coated in cooling sweat, plastered his lips shut and closed his eyes. The arrowtip stung, and the box dug under his ribs. If Yondu was gonna do it, he might as well get it over with.

Death never came. Or if it did, it was highly anticlimactic.

Kraglin dared to start breathing again when Yondu whistled the arrow to his belt. He opened his eyes as his attacker strode for the door of the storage bunker, tossing Kraglin a one-fingered salute to remember him by. “So long, kiddo.”

Kraglin pushed up, one cheek imprinted to match the textured metal on the trunk’s lid. He squeezed his fists until nail bit palm, dotting his lovelines with raw red crescents. “You won’t get away with this," he spat. "Whatever you’re planning, you won’t get away with it.”

Yondu paused on the threshold. Kraglin immediately set to berating himself - because what if he’d just tipped Yondu over that fine wire between amusement and aggravation? But when Yondu twisted to cast him one last grin, it wasn’t at all predatory. It was almost… _challenging._ (It was also accompanied by a wink that made Kraglin’s intestines tie themselves in a pretty bow - but that was besides the point.)

“Why don’tchu come catch me then?”

The door gushed shut. By the time Kraglin had wrestled his shaking legs under him - they were numb from having sat on them for so long, that was all; not weak with the terror of walking toe-to-toe with stabby, radioactive death - and made his way to the bio-locking mechanism, Yondu was long gone.

...The bio-locking mechanism, accessible only by those with internally-wired armchips. So how had Yondu…?

Kraglin looked down. Groaned, and quickly looked back up again. He clicked on his mic, broadcasting through tannoys that had been silent since the riot ran dry, side-stepping into the corridor so as not to get blood on his boots. “Miscellaneous spillage clean-up requested, locker room twenty-four. Obfonteri out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Hope you're enjoying this! Leave comments if so...?**


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **In which Kraglin heads to Vice and meets a girl**

Time passed. Troop rotations came and went. And on the ledger of one of the outgoing crafts was Kraglin’s name.

Kraglin frowned at it, wondering if he was missing a joke. “I’m bein’ transferred? Why?”

The new Archivist shrugged. He was as watery and thin as his predecessor podgy, and Kraglin liked him impossibly less. “None of my business.”

He wasn’t going to get anything out of him. Kraglin sighed, gathering the data pad with his orders in one hand and hoisting his small bag of personal belongings - one toothbrush, one can of fast-drying boot polish, one comb, one razor and a shaving mirror to accompany it, all army-issue and inscribed with his initials in a hand far neater than his own - in the other.

The mystery of Udonta’s plot still evaded him. He’d interrogated everyone who’d had contact with the guy during his short-lived stay - not under any official aegis, because the Kyln was only interested in the prisoners under its roof. Those who’d left, escaped, or had yet to enter its ironclad embrace were of no concern. He’d worked out that a select few items had been pickpocketed from guards. A recording device of some sort. A hairnet from Saal’s quarters (Kraglin didn’t like to consider how Yondu might have gotten access). A shiny and much-loved keepsake from a dead grandma that was probably being flogged at double-price at a spaceship-boot fair, or whatever else Yondu did with his gaudy collection. (He couldn’t possibly _keep_ them. Ravagers were grubby creatures, born of dirt and smoke and engine oil. They had no appreciation for pretty things. Kraglin doubted the tacky baubles he’d spotted in the trunk had especially high retail prices, but if a scary blue pirate with a whistle-guided arrow told him to buy it for a hundred unit chits, he’d cough up as much as the next man.)

But, Kraglin decided, stepping over the rubber sealant-lip of the transport ship and casting a dour look at his fellow outbound souls, that was okay. He was never gonna see Udonta again, so why keep fretting? Nothing had exploded in the capital. Xandar’s structural integrity was, unfortunately, still intact. If Yondu really was an agent for the Kree, his blue skin wouldn’t do him any favours - he could expect ‘random’ spot checks at every port. Maybe even a cavity search or two.

Kraglin selected his slot: an uncomfortable orange plastic seat in a row of uncomfortable orange plastic seats, at least two spaces between him and the nearest corpsman on either side. He let his head droop low between his shoulders, his bag sat on his feet and his skinny arms braced on his knees, and tried to convince his mind that it didn’t want to imagine giving Udonta a cavity search himself.

 

* * *

 

Vice was nothing like the Kyln. Kraglin’s first working order was to take the day to get himself acquainted with his commission, with his coworkers and his new barracks. So he did what any other sane person would. He shirked all friendly smiles and waves and stalked to the nearest bar.

Or rather, the nearest dive. This was Xandar, where most good old-fashioned boozers had been replaced with swanky upmarket micro-breweries, all despicably clean and prim and adhering to Nova-ordained hygiene regulations. Kraglin wouldn’t feel more out of place if he walked into a lady’s lingerie store. He could probably afford the upmarket drinkeries - if there was one positive to having been stationed at the Kyln so long, it was that six months stuck in a floating hunk of maximum security adamantium-plated chrome meant six months of mandatory savings. He’d lived in barracks, and there hadn’t been any big spending opportunities besides taking part in the ongoing betting pool over which prisoner would be next to piss off Small Fry and be relieved of several vital organs. (Kraglin wondered if anyone had betted on Small Fry himself expiring. They’d be rolling in it right now.)

While Xandar took gentrification to its lofty extreme, rent was still a pittance for corpsmen, especially if you didn’t mind holing up in the smallest and grubbiest quarters. Kraglin was used to small and grubby - far more accustomed to it than Xandar’s thrice-swabbed grandeur. With the keycard on his belt corresponding to the lock on the door of a single poky box-room on the one side of the barracks that didn’t get any light, despite the trio of suns that roved across the Xandarian sky, Kraglin was all set up for the thrifty life. Perhaps he’d acclimatize to Xandarian free-spending culture in time? But, he thought as he received his nod from the doorman and stalked into the sleazy, underground bar, he’d never be able to silence the streetkid inside, who hoarded food until it rotted because now he’d sampled what a full belly felt like, he never wanted to go hungry again.

For now though, he wanted more than food in his gullet. He unhooked a bronze credit chit from the internal pocket of his uniform. “Five swizzlers,” he told the barkeep.

“Buyin’ for a friend?”

“Do I pay ya to ask questions?”

The barkeep snorted, weighing up the pros and cons of punching this skinny upstart of a corpsman in his sour beaky face. But an assault on an officer never went unpunished. He did as he was bid, plonking the steaming glasses on the bartop and wiping greasy hands on his apron before pocketing the credit chit and turning away. Kraglin’d wager at least one of his drinks had spit in it. But hey. Added flavor.

“Y’know he spat in that,” offered a conspiratorial whisper from his side.

Kraglin groaned and stood to leave. Or at least he tried - Yondu’s grip on his wrist prevented it. “Woah buddy, woah. Anyone’d think ya didn’t like me. Why so eager?”

“Because,” said Kraglin determinedly looking in the other direction. If he didn’t see Yondu, he wasn’t _technically_ duty-bound to apprehend him, right? “You’re a wanted felon, and I’m a Nova Corpsman. I’ve also just stepped off a transport cruiser. M’jet-lagged, m’tired, I ain’t feeling all that sociable, and I just want a goddamn drink.”

“No better way to be unsociable than when yer with other people,” said Yondu philosophically.

Ugh. Kraglin wasn’t awake enough for this. “I,” he said determinedly, “am gonna drink enough that I forget I ever saw ya. And you are gonna walk back to yer friends, sit yer ass down, and pretend you never saw me.”

Yondu’s smirk didn't droop. But during those seconds after Kraglin finished his speech, which buzzed with the quiet hubbub of chatter from the other patrons and the occasional burst of raucous laughter from the Ravagers, and the quiet _skrsh-skrsh-skrsh_ of the barkeep’s cloth as it circled over the counter, sluicing away slopped booze; that smile gained the consistency of plaster. An expression worn rather than lived. Before Kraglin could treat it to a thorough assessment though, Yondu shrugged and turned away.

“Suit yerself, kid.”

Kraglin huddled tighter around his Swizzlers, expecting Yondu to make a pass at them. But there wasn't even a mocking ruffle bestowed on his head. The ravager simply pushed off the barstool, somehow looking larger than men twice his size as he swaggered to his crew. There the noogeying and chortling and backslaps began anew. Yondu immersed himself in a world of boorish camaraderie. It was as if he’d eliminated Kraglin from his mind. And he made it look so _easy._ He bumped flagons with a bearded man, then hips with a portly woman who looked to be made of more piercings than skin, before being pulled into the side of a massive green dude with biceps the size of boulders. He didn’t glance at Kraglin once.

Kraglin wasn’t watching though, so he wouldn't know. Because he didn’t care, obviously.

Snorting, he lowered his head to his drink. And when he caught the barkeep’s world-weary eyebrow raise, he downed his shots one after the other, sneering at the sour burn of rising stomach acid. He gave him the finger, and wobbled out the door without leaving a tip. 

* * *

Vice was nice. Many things were nice when you were stationed planetside, several lightyears and a thousand charges of gross-misconduct-towards-prisoners away from the Kyln.

Booze was nice. Kraglin drunk plenty of that, now there was actual brand-named liquor to be had rather than moonshine brewed in one of the older guard’s boots (they’d never worked out how to get rid of the fungal flavor).

Girls were nice too. Kraglin had fucked enough to reach this conclusion. An adolescence on Hrax had lowered his standards, and when he couldn't pull he bought cheap, banging poxy whores against the walls of his room until the corpsman bunking nextdoor banged on the opposite side and threatened to report him for civic misconduct and defacement of government property. Thank the stars for Hraxian immune systems. Venereal diseases washed off Kraglin like rain from the bulbous windshield of his cruiser.

And Vice itself? Vice was… _cushy._

Everyone knew everyone. Kraglin hadn’t the first clue why he’d been posted here amid troopers who were, as far as he could tell, upper middle class at the lowest. They didn’t brag about it, all too aware that the lowly Hraxian in their midst hadn’t had the same _opportunities_ they had, what with so-and-so’s aunt getting him his post and so-and-so’s mother being the director of this district. But it remained obvious. And Kraglin had never been the most accomplished at leaving open wounds to heal. He picked at the dichotomy between himself and his coworkers until it scarred.

 _Obfonteri_ was far from a fine and upstanding respectable household name. It was one of those surnames that didn't mean anything much, or whose origins had been lost over time. Half the street kids on Hrax took it as their own. Venture down into Xandar’s sub-city and you’d be hard-pressed to find a street _without_ a grubby little newsagents that hadn't passed food regulation checks since the last astral decade, operating under the banner of _Obfonteri’s._

Kraglin wondered where _Udonta_ came from.

...And damn, he needed a steady girlfriend _yesterday._

He met contender number 1 the very next day. Her name was Halsey. First time he met her, she kicked his ass. And Kraglin apparently had A Type, or he was a little more fucked up than he’d previously assumed, because he thoroughly enjoyed it.

He asked her out for drinks straight after training. Confidence was half the game, he’d learned, when you were picking up chicks way outta your league. Approaching with a wry half-grin and an outstretched hand, his black eye obviously hadn't made too bad of an impression - it’d be hypocritical of her to hold it against him anyway, as she’d been the one to put it there.

“Kraglin Obfonteri. You just kicked my ass.”

“Halsey Kawara. And yes, I did.”

Halsey wasn’t nice. Or at least, she wasn’t _nice_ in the banal sense of the Xandarian streets, which were clean-swept and neat even in the subterranean levels he took her to, to give her a taste of that ‘wild side’ she craved. There was something bitter about her, despite that her workout clothes came with designer labels. Something a little repressed, a little twisted.

Kraglin, as he was discovering, liked twisted. He was drawn to every part of her - he dagger-sharp glare and the sharper tongue that accompanied it; her watery-eyed tolerance of his cheroots and the determined way she demanded drags from them even though they make her cough; her cropped red hair, her blue skin…

They loitered in that bar until the early hours. He didn’t scour its patrons for a hint of a broad yellow grin. He didn’t need to, because he had a gorgeous bombshell on the stool to his left, swigging liquor and burping louder than he was. Who knew if the Ravagers were still in the area, or if whatever nefarious business Yondu had been conducting was done and dusted? No alarum had been raised, so Kraglin told himself he didn’t need to feel guilty about not booking Udonta there and then.

Halsey scowled at him over the rim of her glass. Her lipstick had rubbed: a ruddy stain that matched the hue of her hair and eyes. “You’re distracted.”

Kraglin amended himself, propping his chin on his hands. “No I ain’t.”

“You are. I’m here, telling you all about my tragic past -” It involved a runaway mom and an emotionally absent dad; Kraglin had heard worse. “- And you’re mooning over someone else. I’m not being anyone’s rebound.”

And she brought her glass down with a clash and stood to leave. Dammit. Curse his affinity for short-tempered a-holes. Kraglin, panicking at the thought of another night with only Mr Right and the memories of a radioactive arrowhead hovering close enough to make his neck hair stand erect, did something monumentally stupid, He grabbed her arm. “No wait, you ain’t -”

That was as far as he got. Halsey broke his grip with a practised twist. She wrenched his arm behind him, and slammed him face-first on the bartop. His drink skidded off the edge. The smash and splash registered too late, as if sound were cycling a fraction out of sync with the visual. Kraglin, cheek mashed into the solvent-smelling counter, groaned.

The stand-off - was it a stand-off when you were face down in a sticky puddle of spirits? - lasted no longer than ten seconds, although it teased out to hours in Kraglin's brain. The pain in his shoulder joint was immense. Halsey had rotated it almost out of the socket, wrist bent at a right angle and tendons strained almost to snapping. When she stepped away it was with a little laugh, as if she couldn’t quite believe she’d done that. He let his limb flop to his side, strained muscles refusing to co-operate.

“Fuck you,” he burbled into the remains of his drink. Halsey laughed harder, and tugged him to sit once more, slapping him good-naturedly on the knee.

“Shouldn’t have grabbed me, Obfonteri. Now, you wanna split this dig and head to my place, or what?”

Kraglin rubbed alcohol from his bust lip, wincing at the sting. “You mean yer cubby back at barracks.”

“Damn right I do. Let me tell you…” And she leaned in, eyes glittering like she was sharing a secret. “I don’t believe in kissing on the first date, but I’m more than down to fuck.”

Well, damn. That excused any abuse. Kraglin smirked. It twitched at a zing from his aching shoulder, but Kraglin reinstated it, letting his eyes droop to a leery half-mast. “You an’ me both, sweetheart.” Of course she was a fighter. Of course she was rough and rude and dirty and perfect and everything Kraglin loved - mouth roving hungrily over his from before they reached the lift despite her purported rule on kissing, barging aside any hooting corpsman stupid enough to get within punching distance and flipping off all the others. He had to grab her forearm to stop her fishing out his dick in the middle of the corridor. (She didn’t even dislocate his arm for his troubles!) While he didn’t give two shits about what these hoity-toity richboy corpsmen thought of him, there were certain subjects that he liked to maintain a healthy air of mystery around.

He didn’t, however, stop her from groping him through his pants. Her throaty growl when her fingers crimped the bulge of the knot below, was a match tossed into a rocket fuel factory. Kraglin drove her against the nearest wall. He sampled the skin under her ear, worrying it like a dog and crushing a breast in each hand as he jammed his thigh between hers and ground mercilessly over the gusset of her uniform.

“Fuck,” he snarled against her bared teeth. “You an’ me, we’re gonna have fun.”

And fun they had. But all the fun in the world couldn’t stop Kraglin saying Yondu’s name when he came.

Suffice to say, their fling wasn’t repeated. Kraglin wasn’t even sure he’d be able to get it up if she offered, not given the amount of threats she’d hissed in his ear while her knifeblade shrivelled his hairy ballsack, a pascal of pressure away from nicking. Halsey similarly took care of any gossip regarding the two of them. By the end of the week anyone who’d seen them all over each other in the elevator was convinced they’d taken part in a mass hallucination - that or they were too scared to admit otherwise.

And when the news comes that Udonta had stripped the Xandarian archives of every gigabyte of data pertaining to the noble families of Saal and Rael and etcetera etcetera, and was flogging this precious chunk of Xandarian culture to the highest blackmarket bidder, Halsey met Kraglin’s eye by complete accident in the mess hall. She shuddered and looked away. Kraglin wished he could deploy similar avoidance tactics. He didn’t want to acknowledge this… This _thing._ This little thrill that darted through his body and settled low in his groin just from seeing Udonta’s mugshot blown up on the screen, taking his place among the Nova Corps’ Most Wanted.

He huddled lower on his bench, staring into the different colored nutrient-blocks on his plate until they fuzzed at the edges. So what if he was a bit fucked up? So what if he’d gotten just a _teensy_ bit obsessed with the dude who effectively put him through the worst experience of his life-thus-far at the tender age of sixteen? Trauma was weird and it did shitty things to your head. All Kraglin needed was to bury himself in work for the next couple of years and fuck Yondu out of his system.

That sounded like an excellent plan. Kraglin resolved to start immediately - but his philandering was put on hold when he returned to his room to discover that he’d got mail.

Not physical mail, of course. Postcards were too much hassle when you could ping compact data-bundles across lightyears through a system of interconnected wormholes. They cost as much to deliver as you’d expend in fuel quarts by traveling to their destination in person.

But mail of any kind was unusual. Kraglin tipped his head sideways, as if the different angle would reveal the secrets of the flashing icon on his holographic comm-screen. Then, fending off his trepidations - _could be blackmail from Halsey; maybe she took a vid-clip of us on the sly. Could be a transfer back to the Kyln -_  he poked it.

He was disappointed. _Galley Stock Rotation._ Must’ve been sent to the wrong ID. Odd, given the Nova Corps’ souped-up cyber security, but even the best systems had their glitches. The subject heading sounded dull enough that Kraglin almost spun it into his virtual spam-folder on instinct, pinching the hologram a little too hard and making the bright display distend and stretch. The bin was in the corner of the screen. Kraglin’d arranged his settings so that a mimed throw would send the selected file spinning in that direction and an old Hraxian drinking song would tootle away in celebration if he scored - something involving Nova Prime and her wig and a compromising position that’d get him court martialed if a senior officer overheard.

He dithered however, poised on the cusp of the throw. He wouldn’t mind checking out the menus for the next month. Not that it was gonna be anything other than protein-powder and fiber-juice, standard military provision. But hey. A growing boy could dream.

He plonked the file back down in the center of the three-dimensional holographic interface, which hovered between the projector plate on his desk and the three triangulation-crystals inset into the ceiling. Then snapped his fingers for it to unzip. What he found - Yondu’s grinning blue mug, as many shiny teeth crammed onto the display as he could reveal without removing a cheek - was so far from the expected litany of different coloured dehydrated compact-nutrients that Kraglin whooped in surprise and fell off his chair.

The picture was static. He checked the filetype just to make sure. But he could have sworn that Yondu’s grin had grown impossibly wider.  

“Jackass,” he hissed, pulling himself back onto his seat. It was a rickety metal contraption, four spindly legs and a low-slung back, and it creaked as if it was considering snapping. Given that Kraglin was far from the heaviest Corpsman around, that said more about the quality of his accommodations than anything. The room was miles better than anywhere he’d slept in the Kyln, and _parsecs_ ahead of his favored snooze-spots prior to joining up - which were doorsteps if he was lucky. There was even a window. With _glass._ And it was all made of shiny chrome, like every other damn building on Xandar. (It was all so disgustingly _bright._ There was no respect for those whose eyesight had adapted to heavy smog; no wonder the majority of the Hraxian population stayed underground, in the low-slums where they belonged.) Yondu’s face looked downright ghoulish where it hovered above Kraglin’s desk, like a really tasteless wall-hanging.

Kraglin glowered at it. Then decisively twisted his fingers, scrolling to the next information-byte.

 _Just a little howdy from Izgrati,_ it said. _Wish u were here._

Kraglin squinted at the text for a whole minute before realizing the reason it threw him off and relaxing, chuckling a little. Of course Yondu didn’t type in the same creole accent with which he spoke Xandarian. And as for Izgrati… A quick browse of his starmap revealed it: a toasty moon made entirely of beaches that would be perfect for a holiday resort if it didn’t play host to a native population of Moombas. And apparently, Ravagers too. If Kraglin flicked back to the main picture… Yes, that was definitely sand in the background. Dotted with three-clawed moomba prints, if his eyes didn’t deceive him. And the shadows suggested that Yondu had a nice broad-brimmed sunhat on, to keep his implant from overheating and frying his evil space-pirate brain.

Which meant…

Kraglin swept the message aside and jabbed the comm icon. “Call the fugitive taskforce,” he said to the automated operator. “I’ve got an anonymous tip.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **If you think this is going to go terribly... You're right.**
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> **I really appreciate comments, guys. From anyone, any chapter, any time.**
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> ****


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **In which texts are exchanged and Nova Corpsmen are trampled.**

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2056hrs**

_ I can’t believe you actually fell for that _

**Automated self-deleting message from the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, sent to a civilian number, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2059hrs**

_ shut up. go away. how did you even get this commlink _

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2112hrs**

_ can’t answer the question if I go away can I??? _

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2112hrs**

_how did ur guys enjoy Izgrati anyway? hear it’s real nice this time of year. okay it’s real nice_ all _year if you don’t mind methane. you should’ve gone with the taskforce, boy. could have had yourself a holiday._

**Automated self-deleting message from the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, sent to a civilian number, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2114hrs**

_ what, and walked into that trap you set? _

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2115hrs**

_the trap_ we _set. give yourself credit_

**Automated self-deleting message from the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, sent to a civilian number, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2115hrs**

_ fuck you _

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2115hrs**

_ anytime, kid _

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2115hrs**

_ c’mon it was funny admit it _

**Automated self-deleting message from the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, sent to a civilian number, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2116hrs**

_ Denaarian Quenvi ain’t never going to walk again. _

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2116hrs**

_ I bet you laughed _

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2204hrs**

_ dammit, boy. I thought we had a thing going here. Way to break a guy’s heart. _

**Automated self-deleting message from the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, sent to a civilian number, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2205hrs**

_ you have one of those? _

He  _ had  _ laughed, that was the awful thing. What sort of sick asshole cooked up a plan that intricate, then let it hinge on whether or not some random dude you’d only met twice - a dude on  _ the opposite side,  _ at that? - would betray you? (Okay, so Yondu hadn’t actually been going out on a limb there. But Kraglin  _ could  _ have called his bluff.) Probably the sort of sick asshole who found it amusing when seven trained Nova elites opened the doors of a Ravager smuggling hole that had been bored into Izgrati’s sandstone bedrock, and rather than finding Yondu mid-siesta were instead crushed under a stampede of claustrophobic, gastrically challenged dinosaur-cows.

How Yondu’d got them  _ in  _ there in the first place was anyone’s guess - Moombas were renowned for their hatred of close confines. But most fears, Kraglin supposed, paled into insignificance when you were nose to tip with that infernal arrow.

His holopad pinged again. Kraglin rolled in his bunk, belly to the ceiling. He clicked off the pad - then, in a moment of frustrated pique, hurled it in the general direction of the desk. If Yondu wanted to send him inane crud, he could at least have the decency to do it mid-shift rather than when Kraglin was trying to catch beauty sleep. Kraglin’d deal with him in the morning. And maybe talk to the techies about getting a trace on that holonet ID.

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2205hrs**

_ wow that wounds me _

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2220hrs**

_ what no follow up?? _

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2222hrs**

_ next time I blow up a bank ship. let’s see if that gets ur attention, jackass _

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2345hrs**

_  okay I guess you’ve gone to sleep _

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fP at 2351hrs**

_  poor widdle nova corpsman need someone to tuck him in? _

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fq at 2356hrs**

_  nope, must be asleep if you ain’t responding to that. Night, kid. _

**All messages deleted at 0000hrs**

 

 

* * *

Kraglin woke to the usual symphony: the corpsman in the room above stomping through his morning katas, the faint hum of a recruit using their multiunctional holomatter tool for a makeshift razor, the buzz of troops being clocked in for the day. And the ping of his commpiece.

He swung out of bed and scrambled across the floor fast enough to trip over his oversized sleep socks, which were slopping about on the end of his toes like sock-puppets. He snatched up the holopad and fumbled through the security clearance until he’d found the right combination to convince this hunk of lifeless machinery that he was indeed Kraglin Obfonteri, rankless lowbody in the cranking machine of the Nova Empire - and groaned when he saw Halsey’s icon.

_ Your bf sold the files to the Kree. _

Shit. Kraglin scrubbed a tired hand down his face, pinky catching on the baggy skin under his eye. He wasted a precious minute cussing Yondu’s name, arrow, grin, and supple blue ass. Then he tapped out a reply.

_ The fuck u telling me 4 _

_ Because my sister’s in the taskforce _

_ So what _

_ So she was being stomped on by stinky moombas while Udonta was supposed to be being put into custody _

Shit. Please don’t say her sister took the surname  _ Quenvi . _ Kraglin scrunched his nose. This took a while - there was a lot of it - and by the time he’d finished there was another note waiting in his inbox, the pleeps of the tone a tinny echo of Halsey’s raging voice.

_ She says they got an anonymous tip _

Double shit. Kraglin hoped Yondu was really fucking happy that his little stunt might have ruined his career. He wrote his response in ferocious jabs, imagining each strike of the button was a fist tenderizing Udonta’s smug blue face.

_ So. What. _

_ So anonymous tips aren’t untraceable, idiot. If I find the trail leads to you, I’m going to make you sorry your Hraxian mother shat you out of her scrawny, hairy - _

Kraglin dismissed the call function. That was just uncalled for. Setting his jaw - and striving to ignore the flutter of his heart, which jangled about his chest after having gone from resting to panicked in such quick succession - he instead redialled the civilian caller ID that had been hounding him throughout the wee hours. If he’d failed at delivering Yondu to rightful justice once, the least he could do was send the Systems and Devices team a callsign to trace...

Empty tone. Burner-comm. That fucker.

Kraglin’s holopad had seen a lot of abuse over its short yet busy lifespan. He added to it by hurling it against the nearest wall. Dammit.  _ Dammit.  _ If Halsey made good on her threat… Between her testimony as to that Thing Between Them Which Was Never To Be Spoken Of Again and the damning proof that he’d been the one to raise the false alarm and send the entire damn taskforce scurrying to Izgrati on a wild moomba-chase when they should have had their sights set on the intergalactic blackmarket? They’d have more than enough to put Kraglin away. The eye of Nova Justice wasn’t infallible, but its fist was swift and brutal. Kraglin had heard horror stories of soldiers being court martialled for less.  _ Examples,  _ his CO had liked to call them. And in the greater scheme of the Nova Empire, one slim Hraxian meant very little.

Forget Systems and Devices. This was personal. Career and reputation were on the line. Yondu had hit him where it hurt, and Kraglin wasn’t above retaliating below the belt. He was gonna find Yondu and bring him in solo.

The taskforce had been hunting Udonta since before he slipped the Kyln’s clam-tight embrace. So far, they had one crushed spine, a lingering and pervasive whiff of methane, and a single arrest record to show for it - an arrest Yondu himself had orchestrated. They’d failed, in short. No doubt this most recent blunder would see their budget snipped even further. But underfunding wasn’t the Fugitive Taskforce’s problem. They were hampered by one thing and one thing only - they were cops. And unless there were  _ staggering  _ quantities of money up for grabs, Ravagers didn’t rat out their own, not to the fuzz.

When the Taskforce went incognito, they looked like rich Xandarian kids slumming it to ‘find themselves’. If Kraglin unpinned his badge, stripped himself of his uniform and the iconic over-the-shoulder blaster vest (and, after a lot of lip-gnawing, his holsters) he looked like aguttersnipe. A small distinction, but one of the utmost importance when infiltrating the quadrant’s vibrant criminal underworld.

He’d grown out his goatee specially. Why, he thought, scrubbing over his bristly jaw. An officer with a facial recognition scanner might struggle with this one. In short, Kraglin was ready. He had knives up his sleeves and ice in his heart. He was gonna fix this once and for all. He was gonna find Yondu Udonta, and he was gonna force him to turn himself in. He’d already announced his desire to expend all three weeks of his annual leave at once - it wasn’t like he had anything else to look forwards to, and if he didn’t find Yondu during that time at least he’d get some travelling under his belt before they hauled him before the tribunal. 

Kraglin chewed the tip off his cheroot and spat it to clatter on the panel of his waste chute. He snapped his solar glasses down and heaved his cracked leather civvies-jacket over his shoulders, completing the picture. He had a fortnight and a half to become a suave Hraxian hustler, and he already had the look down pat - and the attitude, if he did say so himself. It was time to hunt pirates.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Just a short one, to get the plot rolling. Leave me a comment?**


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **In which Kraglin curses biological imperatives and Yondu laughs at his misery, as usual.**

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fR at 1139hrs**

_kid what are u doing_

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fs at 1412hrs**

_dammit kid go the flark home_

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fS at 1642hrs**

_kid this is ur last chance. stop looking for me._

**Automated self-deleting message from the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, sent to a civilian number, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fS at 1642hrs**

_my name is Kraglin, a-hole. use it._

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fS at 1642hrs**

_make me_

**Automated self-deleting message from the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, sent to a civilian number, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fS at 1643hrs**

_oh I’m gonna make u scream it_

**Automated self-deleting message from the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, sent to a civilian number, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fS at 1643hrs**

_...can we please pretend I never said that and move on_

**Automated self-deleting message from a civilian number, sent to the personal holonet of Corpsman Kraglin Obfonteri, Astral Date 0Jx89-Jk24fS at 1643hrs**

_kid its like u don’t know me at all_

They were separated by stars-knew how many miles. The closest Kraglin had gotten was a drink Yondu'd bought for some slugger under Kraglin's name and an ensuing barfight, along with a report that a Ravager horde led by a whistling blue man had passed by the nearest quasar a week back, bound for the Outer Rim. Fleets could travel _lightyears_ in that time. And yet, Kraglin had the distinct impression that Yondu was laughing.

“Jackass,” he muttered under his breath. Then snapped his holopad off and shoved it in his pocket, producing his wrist for the conductor of this slummy little smuggling rig to scan. The best way to locate scum, he’d discovered, was to live like them. Thus Kraglin had spent all seven days since he’d signed off his holiday slips getting publicly drunk, vandalizing property, beating up the occasional lone corpsman who crossed his path, and generally making himself a nuisance. And now finally, from some disgruntled agriculturalists who’d had a dent put in their crop yield by hungry Ravagers, Kraglin had a solid lead.

Yondu Udonta was destined for Knowhere.

 

* * *

 

Kyln-guards frequented Knowhere. They extolled its virtues - the cheapness of the whores, the potency of the drink, the ephemeral fortunes won and lost across its gambling tables. The Tivvan Corporation knew the importance of providing their labourers with a steady supply of booze, flesh, and games of chance. Kraglin wondered which of the three had drawn Yondu to Knowhere, then remembered he was only here to slap cuffs on the guy, and ergo didn’t give a shit.

He slimed his way onto a transport and oozed off it similarly, promising he’d return with the fare he owed once he’d visited the casinos. He plied the ship’s inexperienced young captain with assurances in the form of a sackful of trinkets, which he had been sure to tell everyone on board, at great length,  had belonged to his late and beloved mother. It was a shame to be rid of them. They’d been his backup plan - if trawling through Knowhere’s slimy, stinking crevices turned up nothing but Celestial tooth-decay, Kraglin was going to lay those shiny baubles out in a gingerbread trail and wait for Yondu to come to him.

But needs must. Without a Plan B, Kraglin knew this was his last chance at capturing Yondu before he had to either return to the Nova Corps empty-handed and be slapped with a court martial, or plot a course into Skrull territory to live out the rest of his days among frilly-chinned shapeshifters. His very short days. Skrulls weren’t renowned for their love of Empire citizens, even if they hated the Nova Corps marginally less than the Kree.

Best Kraglin concentrate on finding Yondu rather than fretting over what had not yet come to pass. He trundled through Knowhere’s denizens, more at home than he’d ever been in Xandar’s glittering capital. Here there were no silver spires. No lacelike walkways or bubbling aqueducts that sparkled brighter than faceted diamonds under Xandar’s triple-suns. Knowhere had no sun. Just a diaphanous nebula floating in the gloom, baby stars glinting in its depths. Here there was grit, and grease, and gristle; garbage and bodies piled together to moulder. Wet gunge seeped from the walls. The struts that held the Celestial’s arteries open creaked at their joints, bowing under the plod of a million miners’ booted feet.

Kraglin, reflective solar-glasses hiding what parts of his face weren't disguised by the beard, stalked through the hollowed skull with his eyes peeled for red leather. His first ports of call were the gambling dens surrounding the Collector’s abode. Kraglin had never met Tanaleer Tivvan, nor did he want to. He was a bit of a legend among Corpsmen. While he’d never been charged with anything, the Tivvan corporation’s books were almost _too_ clean, and his name frequently came up when dealing with poachers, who were being prosecuted for smuggling undocumented Terrans (that being the word used for any alien whose home planet had yet to make contact with the galactic network). Some rumored that the Collector would pay a hefty sum for a species never-before-seen. Others whispered that all upstart young Nova detectives who thought they could bring him to justice had been disposed of swiftly, efficiently, and quietly.

Kraglin was understandably wary of being outed. Not that he would be. His disguise was foolproof. He’d even gone without the Nova equivalent of deodorant - transparent patches stitched under each arm in his uniform, which soaked up the sweat and never let his pits smell anything less than rosy-fresh. No one’d mistake him for a cop. Not if they got close enough to sniff.   

“Oi, piggie! Piggie-piggie-piggie!”

...Except Yondu. Kraglin twisted, trying to place that infuriating blue jack’o’lantern grin in the crowd. He’d laid his money on the skink, which ran panicked circles around the larger, toothier krazk. He felt a certain kinship with it. From above, it was hard to tell which critter was chasing which. The skink, faster by a good few miles per hour and tighter on the turns, could almost be leading the match. It was only when you got on their level that you saw the terror in the poor thing’s cycloptic eye.

Yondu stood on a table. He was wobbling, either due to the unevenly sawn table-legs or whatever brew was steaming in his tankard. When he had Kraglin’s attention, he treated him to a wave and a bow. Spirits slopped.

“C’mon lil piggie,” he slurred. Taking a hefty swig - and watching Kraglin out the corner of his eye - Yondu smirked when he saw how his gaze tracked the droplet that zigzagged through the stubble on his bobbing throat. He lurched to the floor. The clash of boots on steel echoed even over the grunts and hollers of the Ravagers around the skink-ring. Two more sat in Yondu’s corner: the big green guy from Xandar, and the plump brown lass whose visible skin shimmered with studs and hoops and stretcher-beads. Kraglin, starting to realize how outnumbered he was, swallowed when he saw the white slice of her grin, sharp as the blade she was playing with.

Yondu puffed up. He stuck his chest out, splashing booze in wide arcs to every side, and drew Kraglin’s attention back to himself with a grumpy _hem._ The red overhead light drenched his skin, turning electric blue to maroon. “As I as _sayin’_ ” he started. But the next moment his scowl evaporated, replaced with a grin better suited to an imp. “Catch me if ya can, sucker.”

And then he was off.

His inebriation had been a ruse. Kraglin sussed it as soon as Yondu sprung into action, leapfrogging the table with a grace no drunkard should possess and elbowing through the crowd. But that was already far too late. Anyone who didn’t move was shoved. Yondu must’ve been a well-known patron here - or at least, he had a well-known temper - because while he was barging men twice his size, nobody was brave enough to retaliate.

The same couldn’t be said of Kraglin. He didn’t hesitate, darting after Yondu and skirting well clear of his friends. They didn’t grab for him though. There was a frown on Big Green’s face, but Nosering looked downright gleeful. Kraglin caught the tattered edge of her comment as she dropped a consoling pat on Big Green’s arm: “Don’tchu worry now, Czar. The admiral can look after himself.”

 _Admiral?_ Kraglin wanted to shout - and would have done, had he the chance to grab Yondu’s collar and haul him around to spit in his smug blue face. _You’re the top dog now? When did_ that _happen - before or after you stole them files?_

But Yondu’s coattails were already vanishing. The back of his skull melded into Knowhere’s variegated color-scheme: orange jumpsuits and splats of yellow spinal fuel layered over species of every sort in the Nova Empire. His laughter trailed after him. Implausibly, it seemed to increase in volume whenever Kraglin was barged or buffeted by the waves of people that swirled in Yondu’s wake.

The usual cry of _Nova Corps, stop and drop!_ would have about as much effect on Yondu as a ping-pong ball tossed at a bilgesnipe. Kraglin saved his energy for running. Ducking his chin to his chest, he angled himself so he pierced the crowds like a long bony javelin, and charged.

 

* * *

 

Five minutes later he clattered to a halt, wheezing heavily. It'd been awhile since basic, and fitness regimes weren’t Kraglin’s top priority. Ahead, the tunnel they’d been scrambling through sheered off into bone. Dead end. Nowhere else to run.

Yondu stood with his back to him. The alley was dark and dank. It stank of mold and the preservative gel that was slathered over the Celestial’s atrophied flesh at fortnightly intervals. Slime coated Kraglin's boots. A peddler’s gadget-store had set up at the alleyway's estuary, where the bustling street narrowed dramatically, funnelling Yondu and Kraglin away from the crowds and into a secluded capsule of withered grey vein-matter. The lamp over the stallfront swung from side to side, worked by some old clockwork-age mechanism that announced its presence with a grinding rhythmic creak. The light intermittently filled the alley and abandoned it, either glinting through the crystal of Yondu’s implant or immersing the both of them in shadow.

Kraglin watched their silhouettes grow and recede on the wall. “Yondu Udonta,” he panted. His breathlessness had yet to abate, but it was more out of excitement than exhaustion. “Yondu Udonta, I arrest you as mandated by my status as Nova Corpsman, enforcer of the laws of the Prime…”

“I’ll do anything to get what I want.”

“...On multiple murder-counts, breaking out of the Kyln, speeding, and tax evas - what?”

“I said,” said Yondu quietly, still facing the wall. He didn’t stand especially tall. But between the fluxing light and the jitter under his trenchcoat where Kraglin guessed an arrow was stowed, there was an ominous slant to his posture. As if every muscle was tensed, ready to spring. “That I’ll do anything. To get. What I want.”

He turned around. Somehow, his face was even more expressionless than the back of his head. Kraglin’s grip on his knifehilt faltered, the pommel sliding sweatily against his palm. “O-okay…”

Yondu stepped closer. Then closer still, into Kraglin’s personal space. Kraglin was proud to report that the offensive tilt of his blade didn’t waver. He was less proud about the noise that left his mouth when Yondu casually angled his body against Kraglin’s, muscle and meat fitting around the outjuts of his ribs. His hands - broad hands; a little rough, as any working man’s were, but with none of the scratchy gun-callouses Kraglin associated with soldiers and pirates alike - wound sinuously round his shoulders. And Yondu was staring, without a hint of subtlety, at Kraglin’s shock-parted lips. “I’ll do anything to get what I want,” he reiterated, quiet and sincere. At proximity, his eyes glowed. Kraglin noticed this - although his awareness of the gleam was muted, muffled by the line of contact that ran from their chests to their shins.

By the time Kraglin gathered the coherency to spring away, he’d already been sputtering down at Yondu’s too-close face far past the duration any other Nova officer would have allowed. “A-a-anything?” he stuttered. His face was bright red. He knew it; he _knew it._

Yondu walked him backwards, effectively boxing Kraglin between himself and the alley wall. Retreating would trap him further - but that’s exactly what Kraglin did, almost falling over his own feet in his desperation to achieve some distance, some measurement of space from which he could observe this situation objectively, rather than listening to the hungry pulse in his cock. He was still a teenager after all - if only by a year. Some things were just… biological imperative.

 _Sure_ , he thought frantically as Yondu shrugged and closed the gap, licking his lips like he was tossing up between a kiss or a whistle. _Biological imperative. That’s all this is. Keep telling yourself that._

His biological imperative only became more pressing as Yondu leaned, forcing Kraglin’s shoulderblades flush to the grubby wall. Celestial mucus gunged his back. Delightful. But Kraglin couldn’t contemplate giving a damn, not when Yondu was inches away.

“Anything,” he confirmed. His voice erupted from the base of his chest. It was laced with _just_ enough growl to make Kraglin’s bones vibrate, as well as instigate a supremely unhelpful flashback to a throwaway comment about _ridin’ ya til you break._

...And Yondu was grinning like he’d somehow won this round, though Kraglin had cornered him fair and square. And his capped teeth weren’t nearly so daunting when they were bumping yours, greedily inhaling your air; and Yondu was smirking up at him from point-blank range; and Kraglin’s eyes were drifting closed as sour breath ghosted his lips…

At which point Yondu promptly wrenched his knife free, rammed it in the wall besides Kraglin’s head, and scarpered.

“Later kid!” he called over his shoulder. “I got business to conclude, so don’t’chu come lookin’ for me until morning! Next time ya get the arrow!”

And then he was gone.

Kraglin folded against the wall, wide-eyed and panting. He ran his fingertips over his mouth. Then scowled at himself. He bit the tingle away, hauling himself upright and wrenching his knife free in one sharp motion. He wouldn’t be fooled again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Any comments for a poor starving fic writer?**


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **In which Yondu pays a visit to the Collector, and Kraglin eavesdrops**

Kraglin spent the night shivering in a small fusty room in a small fusty inn, his feet dangling off the edge of the pallet he’d forked out his last remaining credit chits for. Conning his way to Knowhere hadn’t been much of a feat - there were always inexperienced crews to take advantage of, freshly-whetted to the life of intergalactic crime. But Knowhere was the equivalent of a tavern full of old salts, sat on the shoreline of a turbulent sea. Get caught stowing away by traders dabbling for the first time in smuggled goods? They’d drop you off at the next port. Get caught thieving from miners? Your body would be floating in the spinal vats come morning, if there was anything left of you at all.

Kraglin was too furious to sleep. Only the certainty that insomnia would dampen his reflexes and make it easier for Yondu to get the upper hand, made him force himself to close his eyes and lay still on the grotty mattress. He chased slumber with the same tenacity with which he’d chased a sprinting blue figure through the Knowhere markets. They were running in his dreams too. Only there, the sensory overload of the crowd - the bright clashing colors and the noxious fug and the oily sheen of mod-metal - faded to grey. There was only him and Yondu, and the endless tracts of deadspace, as they chased each other to the ends of the universe and beyond.

Kraglin woke up feeling more disoriented than he’d ever been, since that day two-and-a-half years ago when he opened his eyes to the underside of a medi-pod, while being informed via automaton voice that he’d just been picked up from the wreckage of his fleet and was being put through mandatory quarantine. Luckily, this time he didn’t scream.

He was on Knowhere. Far from the Nova-ordained sanctuary of the inner-ring planets, where his profession garnered respect rather than spit-gobs and errant plasma-blasts. He had nearly caught Yondu Udonta. And he could do it again.

This time, Kraglin told himself, rolling from under the blanket, he wouldn’t be duped so easily.

His accommodations smelt distinctly of horse piss, from the pillowcase to the brackish yellow liquid that spurted out of the shower nozzle when Kraglin shucked off his clothes and made to hunch beneath. This was all the more impressive as Kraglin had never met a horse, let alone hung around one long enough to smell the bouquet. He’d probably acquired an ammonic odor to match. But from his memory of last night - which remained vividly imprinted on the backs of his eyelids no matter how many times he tried to blink it away - Yondu had stunk too. Bodily smells, pirate smells. Sweat and moonshine and leather, scents that indicated only that his ship didn’t boast hot-water plumbing and he made poor lifestyle choices, but which Kraglin’s brain for some reason translated as _musky_ and _virile._ So if he complained when Kraglin tackled him to the ground it’d be damn hypocritcal.

Yawning, Kraglin ran a hand through his beard and decided against shaving. He could trim it back to its usual stubbly scruff once Yondu was behind bars. For now, it was time to hit the streets and pray that whatever _business_ Yondu had been conducting, it hadn't been concluded in a single night.

Which was why when he sauntered past the Collector’s tunnel just in time to watch Big Green and Nosering be welcomed by a groupie in a frothy white skirt, he kept right on walking. Then doubled back down the nearest parallel stretch of arterial tissue, and found a humid hollow in which to hunker down and watch.  

He’d never done a stakeout alone - unless you counted the time he lurked in the corridor adjacent to Halsey’s room so he could nip in when she went to the bogs and steal back his only pair of boxers. Keeping track of time ought to be difficult with no overhead sun. But Kraglin had grown up on Hrax, where smog stretched from horizon to horizon in a matte gray wall. He measured each breath, each heartbeat. He watched the mill of itinerant workers across the spongey plaza, where a portion of the Celestial’s inner ear had been excavated to make room for the Collector’s greeting hall. He tapped his nails off the hilt of his knife, _click-click, click-click;_ he ignored how sweat made his clothes cling to his skin and the hair under his arms prickle uncomfortably; and he refused to think of what Yondu might’ve meant by _anything._

He refused to think about it right up until the man himself walked out the door.

Yondu pumped the Collector’s hand, jabbering all the while. “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Y’know how much this deal means to me an’ my boys -” Nosering coughed. “ _And others_. Been a pleasure doin’ business with ya.”

Kraglin had wondered what Ravager diplomacy looked like. Apparently it was all eager grins and boisterous energy and a tone so determinedly cheerful that the recipient had no choice but to smile along. Yondu’s charm worked even on the Collector; his white-painted lips tweaked up for a moment before he daintily extracted himself from the warm two-handed clasp and wiped his fingers none-too-subtly on a napkin. Yondu didn’t take it personally.

“Alright boys!” he hollered. Another jangle of piercings and a sharp look. Another grudging sigh. “ _And others._ We got our contract finalized. Les’ split this joint and fetch the booty!”

“Unharmed, if you would,” said the Collector, hovering on the threshold of his germophobic complex while Yondu hopped onto the street, jumping into a puddle and splattering the Collector’s blastdoor with fetid run-off.  “You seem more… enthusiastic than your predecessor. I trust you know not to let that enthusiasm get the best of you. Should my goods be damaged in any way, there will be repercussions.”

For a moment, Yondu’s expression went artfully smooth. Kraglin imagined the words he was biting back: _repercussions schmepercussions; I don’t need ya to tell me how to do my job._ But then the grin returned full-force. Yondu amped the wattage until it was dazzling _-_ or rather, the reflection of the overhead solar lights off his chipped silver canines was. “I’m a professional,” he told the Collector, thumb jabbing his chest. “You can trust me. Or if ya don’t trust me, trust my love of the dough. I’d earn more by lookin’ after this package than I’d get outta breakin’ it. And I guarantee ya that if I don’t bring in the profit, I’ll be next under the knife.” He raised his voice. “Ain’t that right, boys?” Cough. “And others!”

Kraglin jumped at the sheer magnitude of voices that answered - a raucous assembly of _yessirs_ and _hell yeahs_ and _you got that right, bosses._ The number of Ravagers crowding this street made him mildly queasy. How had they gotten so close without him noticing? Fuck, if one of them spotted him… If one of them placed him as the guy who was gunning for their captain... (Or Admiral now; Kraglin wasn’t quite sure of the nomenclature.)

He pressed back in his hollow, watching through his lashes, and prayed anyone who cared enough to look would think he was asleep. The traders and mercenary-men who’d been prowling these streets had already made themselves scarce. For now there was nothing but Kraglin, slimy tunnel walls, and redcoats: redcoats as far as the eye could see. They perched over the wobbling vent ducts, hunched and vultureish, and gathered like sewer-scum around the grotty outcrops of tissue that overlooked the Collector’s door.

The Collector was satisfied. Clamping his handkerchief over his nose, he retreated into his cloister with an adroit bow. A flick of his wrist had the blast gates grinding closed behind him. Yondu returned the bow, just low enough not to be mocking, to the camera overhead. Circling his hand, he signalled for the Ravagers to fan out, frittering themselves into tributary tunnels. The dissolution was swift and effective. Within seconds, the Ravagers had dispersed, going from a menacing throng to three solitary figures: Yondu, Czar, and Nosering. Kraglin found out her name when Yondu span on her with a snarl.

“Dammit Isla. What’ve I told ya? Just cause ya backtalked me constantly when I was yer captain don’t mean you can still do it now.”

Isla postured right back, crossing brawny arms over a chest stouter than most beer barrels. “What, you too good for banter now, Yondu? You above this?”

“Course I fuckin’ ain’t. Don’t play stupid. Y’know things ain’t like they used to be.”

“What,” asked Isla, propping one hand on the shelf-like jut of a hip. “When we was friends?”

“Isla,” said Czar reproachfully. “Show the boss some respect.” Anyone else might be ashamed to be eavesdropping on a close discussion between compadres. Kraglin was only fascinated with the vein in Yondu’s temple, which looked ready to throb out of the skin and go cavorting down the street.

“Don’t need you to speak for me neither,” Yondu hissed, smacking Czar on a pectoral that was larger than Kraglin’s head, mohawk and all. “Y’know what? I just landed us the sweetest contract of the astral year, and thassa fact. If you idjits can’t be grateful, ya can spend the rest of this lil’ holiday amusing yourselves.” And he turned in a snap of red leather and stomped off.

“Well, now look what you’ve done!” Isla spat at Czar - which was all kinds of unfair, but judging from the eyeroll, the big guy was used to it. “Ya ain’t supposed to go off without yer bodyguards, boss! You’re a big fish now, and there’s plenty who’ll be trolling.”

“I can handle myself!” The holler echoed from the trellises that held up the sagging flesh of the tunnel roof. Kraglin was, against his better judgment, reminded of a stroppy toddler. He bit down on his sleeve to stifle the snigger.

“But what if that Nova Corpsman finds you?” called Czar, evidently the voice of reason for the trio. Isla rolled her eyes.

“Lil’ wetnose like that? Our cap’n ain’t got nothing to worry about. It’s the Horde we oughta be watchin’. Them or our own damn crew -”

“Hey, us lot agreed to mutiny together. We knew the stakes. We knew some of the crew wouldn’t take the power handover prettily -”

“More like they’d try and stab us in the back at the slightest hint of weakness… Wait.”

“What?”

“Where the fuck did he go?”

Yondu’d taken advantage of his henchmen’s bickering to take a sharp twist into one of the tunnels that mapped the fusion lines of the Celestial’s skull. Which, neither could say for certain.

Kraglin could. Not that he was volunteering that information.

“You take the low gum, I’ll take the upper incisors,” Isla said grimly, thumping Czar’s nearest arm. Czar nodded, all business.

“Convene back at ship in an hour, then gather reinforcements?”

“Sounds like a plan. Now get walkin’, big boy. If our cap’n winds up stuffed an’ mounted in Romago’s trophy cabinet, I’m blamin’ you.”

Kraglin waited until they’d left, stalking down two opposite passages that would funnel them through Knowhere’s teeming headspace in entirely the wrong direction. Then he crawled out of his burrow, casting a nervous glance at the camera, and scampered after Yondu.

It was an interesting experience, to say the least. Without his gang at his back, Yondu didn’t exactly _shrink -_ his presence still commanded attention from the laborers, who inundated the grimy streets when an overhead klaxon blared, signalling the change of shifts. The heavyset men and women wore the scars of their trade: a missing arm here, a scarred-shut eye or scalded cheek there, burned by Celestial bile. Kraglin was careful not to pay them too much attention. Folks like these got mighty testy about staring.

Urchins flitted between them. Kraglin disliked brats on principle, and having shared a past with these sorry buggers didn’t make him any more amenable to their presence. Any dumb enough to target him found themselves nursing dislocated fingers.

Yondu however… No way did he not notice that kid dipping her mitts into his pocket. But there was no sharp whistle and no scream, and when the prize - another glass trinket, like those Kraglin had found in his case at the Kyln - caught on the pocket lining, Yondu simply turned, and relieved it from the brat with a flick on the ear in chastisement. Before she could scarper, he performed a sleight-of-hand that Kraglin had to squint to discern the details of in the watery tunnel-light. The end result was undeniable though. Yondu returned the shiny toy to his coat, and a unit chit glinted in the girl’s pox-scarred hand, before it was bitten between pointed teeth and accepted with a nod.

 _Don’t be stupid,_ Kraglin wanted to tell him. _You spare a penny for one an’ they’ll all have you marked._ But as Yondu let the kid go with a cuff to the head that looked a lot harder than it was, Kraglin found himself smiling.

He kept following him. He followed him through a gland encrusted with stalagmites of fossilized fat, miners swarming the still-functioning mucus nodules like termites on a mound, and down into the stagnant airless passageways that were bored through the Celestial’s palette. He followed him all the way to the hotel where he’d stayed the night before.

Shit.

Kraglin’s mouth went dry. But he waded onwards, dodging between the grunting workman and the broad copper crucibles, into which spinal fluid was being decanted in steaming spurts. He’d used a false name. He’d had his solar glasses on, and didn’t exactly stand out amid the tides of workers and mercenaries, bounty hunters and poachers, smugglers and pickpockets and other assorted vermin. He doubted the front deskman even remembered him. This could all be one big coincidence…

Fat chance. Kraglin would like to claim that hope never hurt a man, but he knew from experience that optimism killed. Better to be a realist, and spring the trap before it snapped shut around him. Kraglin slipped his shiv up his sleeve, and went to cosy up to the doorman.

This was far from an upper class establishment. But fights were all-too common on Knowhere and rarely good for business - unless that business was the gladiatorial trade. The bouncer was as broad as the door he was guarding. Kraglin simpered at him, as sweetly as a man whose face was seventy-percent nose and bad teeth could.

“Room for one?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **After an unexpected computer crash, an internet crash, and a mandatory (endless) restart for updates, I finally got this sucker uploaded. Kiss my non-existent balls, universe.**


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **In which there is a kiss and cuffs.**

He creaked up the rickety stairwell. The tavern was hewn directly into the Celestial’s cheek tissue; the walls and ceiling were tough as fossils, but sagged under their own weight, making the corridor look as if barrage balloons were bulging on all sides. The stairs themselves had been worn smooth, each polished to the gleaming ochre of a wet ammonite. Kraglin’s boots skidded, and he had to hold the wall for balance. But he made it to the top. On his left was the room he’d been assigned tonight. He’d scrumped credits from the pockets of merchants and star-sailors that he'd passed en route, avoiding the biggest, toughest looking assholes who were liable to use him as a toothpick if he was caught (as well as anyone in a stained red coat). By the time he reached the front desk, he had a pathetic mound of copper and bronze chits, worth no more than pennies, but enough to secure a last-minute deposit.

Waste of money, considering that his destination was a different room entirely.

Kraglin willed the knot in his chest to ease, staring along the corridor to the chipped metal door at its far end. Then, steeling himself, he walked past his room without stopping and knocked.   

The door swung open. Yondu’s fist swung out.

It caught Kraglin’s collar, then yanked him in so the captain - Admiral; whatever - could snarl up close and personal. “Thought I told ya to go home.”

Wow. Those teeth didn’t get any more pleasant with proximity. It spoke to Kraglin’s own lacking dental hygiene that he didn’t find them repulsive. But then again, there was so much of Yondu that ought to terrify any sane man (chiselled implant, glowing eyes, bulked-out shoulderpads and trenchcoat flung back over the arrow) that maybe he simply had too much to focus on. Kraglin strained against the grip, trying to find a distance where he couldn’t smell Yondu’s breath. “Uh, I have a bad case of selective hearing -”

“I’ll fuckin’ say. Y’know what my boys woulda done if they caught ya snooping around outside the Collector’s?”

“Eaten me?” Kraglin hazarded. Then frowned. “Wait, how did ya know I was -”

“They’d chop off yer lanky legs so ya couldn’t run,” Yondu continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Then they’d flay ya, nice and slow. Fillet any meat thas’ hidden under that dumb jacket of yours…” Kraglin squared his shoulders, scowling. His jacket was _cool._ “... _T_ _hen_ they’d eat ya. So congrats, kid. Yer ‘selective hearing’ very nearly got ya dead. Bet you feel mighty smart.”

He had a point. But there was one flaw in Yondu’s argument, one so large and self-evident that Kraglin might’ve missed it entirely had it not been for the violent pound of his heartbeat in his ears. “Yeah, I _could_ be dead,” he said, craning over his nose at Yondu’s silver-dipped snarl. “But I ain’t. Why’s that?”

“Because,” hissed Yondu, slamming the door button - it reeled shut, taking a clump of Kraglin’s mohawk along for the ride. “I ain’t gotten round to it yet.” He gave Kraglin a shake, smacking his stinging scalp off the metal. “M’thinkin’ it’s high time I got in some target practice.”

Only one chance. Kraglin wet his lips, skull smarting. If he survived to look back on this moment, he would blame the stupidity of what he was about to say on the daze. “Go on then,” he croaked.

Yondu’s posturing faltered. Just for a second, Kraglin saw bewilderment behind those sharp red eyes. “What the…”

“You heard me.” Kraglin’s head rolled loosely around his neck, like one of the makeshift sock-soap cudgels prisoners regularly beat each other to death with in the Kyln. “C’mon. You’d do anything to get what you want, right? That includes killin’ Nova Corpsmen.”

“Heheh. ‘Corpse’-men.”

Kraglin blinked.

Had he just…?

It was rare to find puns that coexisted on both sides of a universal translator. But while Kraglin had never heard of a _Centaurian -_ he’d have to do some research - apparently they spoke fluent Xandarian. He hacked out a chuckle without quite thinking it through. “You’re awful,” he told Yondu - then remembered that he was very much at Yondu’s mercy and that this might not be an appropriate thing to say to a mass-murdering Ravager, even if they did make terrible puns, and cringed.

Yondu didn’t take offence. “I woulda killed ya if you didn’t laugh.”

“Of course you would’ve.”

“Totally.”

Kraglin shifted. The grip on his collar slackened, just enough to give him space to get comfortable. It clamped tight again before he could consider escape. When Kraglin swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbed against it like a buoy lifted and dropped by the tide. An amusing little interlude that might have been, but it didn’t change the fact that this was, as they liked to say in the Corps, _a bit of a bad situation._

“So,” he tried, standing with legs bent so he could assess Udonta on his own level. His knees knocked on Yondu's shinguards. “Are you gonna tell me how you found this place? Or have you been watching me the whole time?”  

Yondu pulled back, just far enough for Kraglin to see his affronted expression. “You’re the one who made it sound creepy.”

Big talk, from the guy who’d as-good-as admitted to stalking him. But that didn’t explain _how._ And despite his life being on the line, and Kraglin’s intimate awareness of Yondu’s lips being tainted by the knowledge that they could purse to whistle at any moment, he was a curious bugger. "You have spies? Can’t be the Ravagers dobbing me in - if they’d known I was outside the Collector’s, they’d have gutted me.”

Yondu hoisted a shoulder. “Don’t need no spies.”

“Yeah, but I’da noticed if you were skulking around.” Kraglin nodded to… well, him in his entirety: ripped merlot trenchcoat, gold flame patch, scarred blue skin, implant and all. “You ain’t exactly built for incognito.”

Yondu let go of his collar to scratch the seam of that implant. Ruby mineral dived under a wrinkle of flesh, sinking through his skull and into the delicate tissue beneath. “I don’t kiss and tell.”

“But we haven’t kissed -”

Yondu’s grin was as jagged as it was sly. “Yet,” he corrected. Then he leaned in. Crown thumping the door, Kraglin realized there was nowhere further to retreat to, an instant before blue lips closed on his.

 _Scratchy,_ was his first thought.

 _Nothing like kissing Halsey_ was his second.

But now was not the time for comparisons. Because against the spitty, shock-parted circle of Kraglin’s mouth there flicked a wet blue tongue. After that it became a string of half-conceived observations, their edges left billowing at the fringes of his brain.

Hot.

Yondu’s skin was cool on the surface. (Kraglin learnt this from the knuckles brushing his collarbones, as Yondu used his grip on his jacket collar to twist Kraglin’s head to where he wanted it.) But on the inside, he was sizzling. The pass of his tongue over Kraglin’s blazed like a mouthful of capsicum. Kraglin tasted alcohol, sourness, stale spit and the taste of his own cheroots, fed back to him by Yondu’s hungry licks. Stubble rasped and caught, pulling lightly as if someone were stroking Kraglin’s beard in the wrong direction.

Yondu’s coat bulked him out, but when Kraglin’s hands stole under it they found a trim, tough little body, pleasantly curved with muscle. Muscle that relaxed as Yondu felt Kraglin reciprocate; propping his jaws wider, angling so his nose didn’t give Yondu a shiner and stroking the very tip of his tongue over the underside of Yondu’s own. Yondu groaned in his throat, eyes slivering. For the first time since he’d met him, his guard lowered. It didn’t drop entirely. But Kraglin liked to imagine Yondu as a fortress, and right now that heavy portcullis of suspicion, mistrust, and constant vigilance honed from years at the helm of a Ravager warband hovered at half-mast.

Which gave Kraglin the perfect opportunity. Nova corpsmen were expected to fight fair. But hey - Kraglin was on holiday. And as Saal had always liked to say, he’d have made a far better crook.

Kraglin internally crossed his fingers. He thought of what was waiting for him when he returned, prize in cuffs: a promotion, a raise, maybe a sincere and signed letter of apology from Halsey. And then he bit Yondu’s tongue.

Blood erupted. The taste - bitter, oddly citric - was as much a shock to Kraglin’s senses as the pain must have been to Yondu’s, judging by his muffled curse. But wrenching away would be far more damaging for Yondu than for Kraglin, and certainly no whistling was going to occur while Kraglin held his mouth captive. Even socking him in the gut was out. So long as Kraglin kept his serrated incisors digging into the slices he’d left on the upper and lower sides of Yondu’s tongue, he was safe.

But they couldn’t stay like that for ever. Kraglin kept a finger hooked in Yondu’s beltloop, feeling the ratcheting tension in the body pressed tight to his. With his spare hand he unhooked the cuffs he’d tethered under his jacket - flatpack Nova issue, which inflated with an audible _whoosh_ as soon as he pressed the activation button. They were solid and silver, joined with a solid bar rather than a chain. Snapping them around Yondu’s wrists - he evaded Kraglin only for a moment, before Kraglin pointedly worried his lower jaw and saw Yondu’s pupils pinprick with pain - felt better than if Nova Prime had pinned a medal to his lapel in person.

...Which was odd, considering Kraglin was only in this for the glory. (And to save his own skin, of course.) Surely the thought of all that recognition and respect, which awaited his return, ought to make him happy?

Kraglin put it from his mind. There were more immediate concerns: like how the fuck was he supposed to maintain the bluff that he’d caught Yondu by conventional methods, rather than with a bite and a kiss? And (more worrying still) how was he going to convince Yondu to play along? He was gonna need a gag, Kraglin decided. Both to prevent this secret spilling, spilling like the slippery gush of blood into his mouth, so much of it that he was forced to swallow - a single mouthful of sour blue that stung his oesophagus like it was acid - and to stop him whistling.

Only when Kraglin released his bite, whistling wasn’t the first thing Yondu tried. He spat a blob into Kraglin’s eye - surely a biohazard, but no more than drinking what felt like a half-gallon of the stuff. “Fuckin’ hell, kid,” he lisped, yanking at his cuffs. “An’ here wash me thinkin’ we wash jusht shtarting to get on.”

Kraglin wiped his face. His mouth was claggy with blood and saliva. Unlike Yondu however, he had the courtesy to aim his gobbit at their boots. “I’m a Corpsman,” he said simply. “You’re a Ravager. We ain’t meant to get along. And you, Yondu Udonta, are under arrest.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **They are both terrible people and I don't know why I love them. And yet... Drop a comment if you've read this far?**
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> ****


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **In which there are two fights and some healthy frottage.**

Kraglin had already sent out the call. He'd opted for a non-anonymous tip this time, because if this ploy failed there was no going back and he might as well commit seppuku there and then. He arranged to meet the taskforce on an uninhabited moon a few kliks centerwards of here. He was gonna hand Yondu over, waive the bounty out of the goodness of his heart, so long as they promised not to investigate any further into the first anonymous tip (okay, so maybe he’d waive _half_ the bounty. A third. A slim-cut quarter.) and return to the gruelling drudgery of life as a junior corpsman with his head held high. He may not be a ranking officer, but he knew that after this, his reputation would precede him.

 _Kraglin Obfonteri;  Udonta’s nemesis._ He liked the sound of it.

Only problem was, before he could celebrate he had to wrangle Yondu through Knowhere without being spotted by any of the Ravagers on their Admiral’s tail. And convince Yondu not to make how this victory came about public knowledge.

“It’ll be just as bad for your rep as for mine,” he tried, shoving Yondu’s shoulders when the cuffed man stumbled to a halt. He’d stripped him of his longcoat, and clad only in the underlayers of his Ravager garb (with Kraglin’s jacket draped over his head to cover the implant) Yondu didn’t look nearly so imposing. Kraglin was almost convinced he could pull this off.

Yondu sniggered through the belt Kraglin had pushed between his teeth. He didn’t reply - not that he could. But something about his posture indicated that crazy stunts like snogging Nova Corpsmen were regulars on his to-do list. Who knew? Maybe they were. Maybe Ravagers didn’t find fraternizing with the enemy shameful. They probably encouraged it - anything to get better intel. _Yeah,_ Kraglin thought, nudging Yondu with his knife when he tried to veer off course. _I bet he was just using me too. Hunting for info about the taskforce - that’ll be it. I was nothing more than an opportunity. If I hadn’t taken it, he would’ve._

Yet as they finished their uphill trek and rounded the corner into the Celestial’s burrowed-out, miner-ridden eyesocket, Kraglin didn’t feel all that righteous. He held Yondu’s bicep in one hand, using his knife to guide him. With the coat over his head, Yondu might as well have been walking blind. But it didn’t take them long to establish a rhythm - one poke for _freeze,_ two for _don’t dawdle,_ three for _I fucking mean it or I’ll stab you._ By the time they approached an unattended craft with a biolock Kraglin could hack in his sleep, they were walking almost seamlessly. Kraglin shortened his stride to match that of his prisoner. Yondu, for his part, didn’t seem especially unnerved about not being able to see where he was going. He must trust Kraglin not to lead him into a spinal fluid vat, or leave him standing over a vent to the furnaces that broiled and bellowed in the Celestial’s truncated throat. It would kinda defeat the point of bringing him in alive. That was one thing the taskforce had stipulated; they wanted to know the minutiae of how Yondu had broken into the archive and stolen the familial record, and interrogating a corpse yielded few useful results. Unless, of course, you possessed a certain purple stone - but that was another story.

“You better not run,” Kraglin muttered as he jigged the lock. Under the folds of the jacket, Yondu's head inclined in what might have been a nod. And sure enough, when he turned Yondu was right where he’d left him. He had a new addition though - the streetgirl he’d given the chit to earlier. She was giggling as she tried to wedge her hand in his pants-pocket and retrieve the stashed trinket, while Yondu shuffled from side to side like a horse shaking off flies and occasionally aimed a kick.

They all missed her. Which was kinda improbable, given she was laughing too hard to dodge. Kraglin’s didn’t. He sent her scurrying with a sharp application of boot to backside. “Scat! Lil’ monster. An’ as for you, Udonta… Quit muckin’ around.” Agitation made his tone harsher than usual. He scanned the dock back and forth, expecting at any moment to be accosted by an oncoming hurricane of redcoats, or a pissed-off ship owner. “Yer under arrest, remember? In my custody, too. That means you do what I tell you.”  

He was so engrossed with checking their perimeter that he failed to notice Yondu’s breathing rate pick up. Or the way he flexed his fingers, then decisively popped his thumbs back into their sockets so the cuffs sat snug around his wrists once more.

They climbed the gangplank in silence, Kraglin keeping Yondu ahead of him. Only once the doors reeled shut did he unwind the jacket from around his prisoner’s skull. “You gonna behave?” he asked quietly. Yondu’s eyes were creased at the corners. If he had full use of his mouth, Kraglin reckoned his smile would be crimping his ears.

 _Behave?_ That face said. _Me?_

Well, there was only one way to find out if he was bluffing. Kraglin slung his jacket over one bony shoulder, hunching to prevent it from slithering straight off again. Then he reached behind Yondu’s crown, fingertips brushing the implant - oddly warm - and moving slow so he didn’t jerk away. He unbuckled the belt.  It slid wetly from Yondu’s mouth, followed by a string of bloody drool. Yondu ran his gashed tongue over cracked lips, teeth glinting like diamonds on a saw. That left a navy sheen, one Kraglin did his utmost not to stare at as he continued to address him. “Do you promise not to whistle?”

“Aw. You’d take me for my word? Mighty cute of ya. Thought you outgrew that way of thinking first time I tossed ya out a spaceship.”

The airlock was at Yondu’s back, not Kraglin’s, and they were still in atmosphere. Kraglin therefore felt justified in taking a step closer, observing the other man over the prow of his nose. “You’ll have difficulty pullin’ that crap now. I ain’t a kid no more.”

“Mm-hm.” Yondu’s placid blink suggested he was agreeing only to appease him. Grinding his jaw, Kraglin reached around him, long arms looping Yondu’s torso. He fiddled with the cuffs until the third ring popped free, a feature of solid light technology that coagulated into existence with a mosquito-like whine. This he snapped closed around one of the pipes that jutted from their ship’s damp-crusted walls. She was an old thing, that was for sure. Mildew-stained and dinged, her inner chamber pockmarked from where a drunken driver had bounced off garbage pods and spotlight rigs, and the Celestial’s molars, and everything between. Kraglin hoped she wasn’t desolate: left here so that her batteries would drain, away from the light of the stars. He was gonna need juice to make it to the rendezvous, and fuel prices here were among the most astronomical he’d seen. No wonder so many who came never left.

Yondu folded to sit with surprising ease, giving into the pressure of Kraglin’s palms on his shoulders. Kraglin didn’t doubt that he could resist if he wanted to - which was why his going willingly sent thrills darting straight to his crotch. Kraglin was as far from feral as they got. He’d been born and raised on an industrialized planet, and while he’d needed to forage for food as a child, his hunting grounds had been dense, smog-polluted markets and overladen stalls, not forests or oceans or broad savannahs, or any of those other places Hrax used to have, before the Nova came. But having Yondu do as commanded made a part of Kraglin he wasn’t even aware he had lift its head to the sky and howl. Being in charge wasn’t a sensation Kraglin got to relish often, and now he had the opportunity he never wanted to rescind it. It felt _good_.

Which was precisely why Kraglin didn’t trust it.

“Why’re ya makin’ this so easy?” he muttered, tugging on Yondu to check that the cuffs were secure. Yondu hitched a lip, showing off a silver canine.

“Ya really wanna complain? I can struggle if ya want me too. Heck, I’ll scream ‘rape’.”

“Hilarious.”

“What? Ain’t like anyone’d come. This’s Knowhere, remember. I’m just savin’ my energy.”

He had a point, but that didn’t mean Kraglin trusted it any further than he could toss a caber in high-gravity. The blue gloss on Yondu’s underlip had hardened to a flaky chips. Yondu swiped his tongue over it again. The bitemarks had finally begun to clot, but they weren’t there just yet; Kraglin took over before he could make more of a mess, thumbing the smear away.

It wasn’t a calculating move. If anything, it was made out of practical necessity. If Kraglin didn’t clean it up, he’d keep contemplating what Yondu’s mouth would taste like if he dove back in for seconds. Really, this was the only way to keep things professional. Professional was exactly what Yondu wasn’t, as he let his lips part, Kraglin’s thumb pressing a centimeter into the humid darkness beyond. Kraglin, expecting Yondu to pay him back for the earlier chomping session, was surprised to find his thumb unmolested - Yondu only held it in his mouth, staring at Kraglin the whole while.

Dammit. Tight pants weren’t designed for this abuse.

Kraglin unstuck his jaws. “I’m gonna need that back to start up the ignition sequence.”

Yondu held on a second longer, tongue twitching against the nail when it dug into the still-leaking impressions of Kraglin’s teeth. Then snorted, letting it pop free. He licked his lips as if chasing Kraglin’s flavor. “Suit yerself,” he said.

Despite his excuses, and the pressing need to be away before the owner of this craft returned, if it had an owner at all, Kraglin lingered. “The fuck was that?” he asked.

Yondu cleared his throat before replying. His husk was hoarser than ever, and when he blinked it was far too sultry, far too slow. “I’ll do anything to get what I want.”

“Yeah, you said that before -”

“No.” Yondu angled his chin at the stirring bulge in Kraglin’s pants. “I’ll _do anything_ to get what I want.”

“You said that too.” Or insinuated it; same difference. Enough time-wasting; Kraglin sauntered through to the cockpit, slinging his lanky body across the chair. If glaring out into the void past the gaping eye socket gave him a chance to control his breathing, willing the arousal away, that was just coincidence. “And I wound up with a knife in the wall by my head. Ain’t happenin’ again.”

“Yer the one holdin’ the knife. I’m cuffed. What’m I gonna do?”

Kraglin toggled in the start-up sequence as he answered: “Whistle?” That was the problem with erasing a biosignature from a palm reader - it got you onto the ship, but scuppered any chance for a quick getaway. You had to fill in all your personal piloting preferences from scratch.

He heard the rustle of Yondu getting comfortable, cuffs clinking on the pipe. “Ain’t yet, have I?”

Kraglin had noticed. He’d also decided not to call him up on it, in case that was the trigger that tipped Yondu’s temper out of his favor. For now, the fact that he was still breathing - and through his nostrils rather than an extra windhole in the chest - remained the elephant in the room. “So tell me,” he said, boosting the chair and pushing it along its runners so his legs could cram beneath the dashboard. “What’s this thing that you want?”

Yondu laughed. “Money. Infamy. People to piss themselves at my name.”

“Sounds messy. But that ain’t what I meant, and you know it. What’s it that ya want from _me_?”

A sigh. When Kraglin glanced at the windscreen, mirrored before lift-off to protect the pilot from the harsh white spotlights on the Celestial’s canines, he found Yondu cross-legged, blood smeared in his stubble and stare just waiting for the chance to latch onto his. Which it did, as soon as he caught Kraglin looking. “What I want is for you not to blast off this damn rock. For you to undo these dumb cuffs and lemme walk. And yer gonna do it too. I know it, because I know you wanna _fuck me -_ ” The crude snap of those words was further emphasized by Yondu’s lascivious lick, blood squeezing from his tongue even as he lapped up the last of the stain around his mouth that Kraglin had failed to remove. “-More than ya wanna collect on my bounty. So tell me, kid. Do we got a deal?”

A month ago, a week ago, a day ago, Kraglin would have taken him up on the offer without further thought. Any cute blue guy propositioning him was an automatic 'hell yeah' - that that blue guy was boss of a pirate band, and one Kraglin held a personal grudge against, only upped the stakes. So why did he have the feeling he’d been played? His fingers ceased their practised jitter over the console. For a moment, he was convinced… But no. It couldn’t be. Could it?

“You didn’t connive all this just so you’d have an excuse to proposition me, did you?” he asked, just in case. “Because y’know, all you had to do was buy me a drink.”

The silence was telling. _Too_ telling. Then Yondu scoffed and glowered at the floor. “Last time I tried ya told me to fuck off and let yer sorry ass drink alone.” Paraphrasing. But Kraglin supposed he’d gotten the gist. “The fuck was I s’pposed to think? I know yer kind. Flarkin’ Nova Corps, always needin’ an excuse…”

“ _That’s_ what this is?” Kraglin couldn’t help it; he laughed. His outstretched hands circumscribed their situation, in its quadrant-spanning entirety: from the Nova Corps dedicating a taskforce to their renegade prisoner, to the Kree having sensitive Xandarian cultural documents in their possession, and Halsey baying for Kraglin’s blood. “To get my _attention?_ Well, you flarkin’ got it. Congratulations.” He settled on his chair, arms folded over his chest, sneering through Yondu’s reflection and into the abyss, where not two kliks from here a Nova platoon would be gathering. “No fuckin’ wonder you’re single. You almost cost me my job, my rep, my integrity as a Corpsman… All because you’re hungry for my dick?”

“Job, rep, integrity… Ya really care about all that bollocks?” Yondu’s chuckle was significantly nastier now. “Per’aps I don’t get ya so well as I thought.”

He had a point, not that Kraglin would concede it. “Yeah! Maybe you don’t!”

“Hey now, boy.” Yondu lounged back against his pipe. His anger faded as soon as it had surfaced. If what it was replaced with - an indolent smirk - was feigned, than Yondu was a damn fine actor. “Yer the one that chased me.”

“Of course I did! Because you ran!”

“Now, I ain’t no expert. I dunno what that might mean on yer planet. But where I'm from, that usually implies a person wants to get away.”

He didn’t get to play the victim card. Not here, not now, not with Kraglin, not ever. Kraglin furiously cranked the throttle, scowling as the ship’s rusty engines wheezed out a gust. “You _told_ me to catch you! And, as I keep reminding you, I’m Nova. It’s my job description!”

“What, to ruin other people’s fun?”

“To stop a-holes like you running amok throughout the galaxy! Now, if you’ll excuse me…” Kraglin coaxed that gust into a storm. He amped the engine output until the ship’s crudely-stapled hullplates rattled in their casing. “I have a rendezvous to make!” he hollered over the roar.

“Flarkin’ hell, kid.” Yondu let himself be bounced across the floor for the duration of two blinks. Then he tired of it - or got queasy. Either way, enough was enough. He popped his thumbs out of joint, dragging them through the tight hoop of the handcuffs with barely a wince. The jangle as metal smacked pipe made hairs prickle on the back of Kraglin’s neck. His grip on the throttle tensed, in preparation for him to spin around and plant a fist in Yondu’s jaw.  “‘Fraid I can’t letcha do that.”

Deja vu weighed on Kraglin like a lead-lined lifejacket. Turning from the pilot relays, leaving the activated ship to judder and shake its way through its stagnant fuel supply as he swung his legs over the side of the chair, he dropped into a low crouch and snapped his knife from its wrist-sheath. They were going in circles. Like charging bulls that locked horns again and again, never stopping to consider _why._  But if someone had to put a stop to the cycle, it wasn’t gonna be Kraglin. Let Yondu be the mature one for a change.

“‘Fraid I can’t letcha just walk outta here either,” he mimicked, tilting his blade so the overhead spotlight glanced into Yondu’s eyes. Yondu’s mouth twitched upwards. If he was dazzled, he didn’t show it.

“Seems we got us a lil’ problem then,” he drawled.

“Seems we do.”

Kraglin flung the knife.

It was fast as a viper strike. Yondu ducked - barely. That gave Kraglin time to follow the cartwheeling blade. While it struck, embedded hilt-deep in the vacuum seal behind Yondu’s head and shuddering contrary to the vibrations of the ship, his shoulder smacked Yondu’s gut. He barged him against the door. The hollow clang of implant on steel rung almost loud enough to smother Yondu’s laughter.

“Atta boy!” he croaked breathless, pounding Kraglin between the shoulderblades like he was congratulating him. “We’ll make a fine Ravager of ya yet!”

He was looking to antagonize. Kraglin knew it. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t working. He slammed Yondu down, shoulders smacking floor, looming over him like an animated scarecrow. Every inch of his angular body bristled with fury. “I,” he hissed, teeth flecked with spittle and bared an inch from Yondu’s own, “am not. And never will be. A Ravager.”

Yondu’s grin grew as if someone had attached clothes pegs to the back of his head. “Wanna bet?”

“I wanna punch you in the frutarkin’ gob -”

“Nah. We’ve covered this.” Yondu yawned, letting his body go lax under Kraglin’s weight. Not that that weight was especially significant, but it was the intent that counted. Yondu lolling out beneath him, all slack and warm and solid to the touch, felt like the opposite of a power display. But Kraglin saw through the ruse. Yondu's smile was languid and sleazy; he was only presenting his throat because he knew Kraglin didn’t have the fortitude to bite it. “Y’know what’chu want. Unlike me though, you refuse to _take_ it.”

Kraglin made a rude noise. He retrieved his blade from the airlock, the seal deflating with a quiet _phwee._ Seemed their hermetics weren’t quite so hermetic anymore. They were gonna need a new getaway vehicle - but Kraglin’d deal with that when he had to, and not a moment before. For now he rested the knife's edge on Yondu’s jugular, twitching in time with his pulse. He sure hoped the engines didn’t choose this moment to backfire. Neck hemorrhages were rather more severe than bitten tongues - and the taskforce wanted Udonta alive. “Oh yeah? Well, if you’d do anything to get what you want, why ain’t you whistling?”

“Don’t wanna break that purdy face of yours.” That was the most ridiculous thing Kraglin had ever heard - both that his face might be described as _purdy_ and that Yondu might care about damaging it. Yondu craned over himself, chin squashing into his neck and eyes slanting to Kraglin’s knife. “So you gonna use that? Or is this just yer way of sayin’ ya wanna do me rough?”

Kraglin considered the first option (and the second, if he was being honest). But while Yondu’s insolent grin had yet to waver, he wasn’t finding it as infuriating as usual. It was as if someone had flicked a switch, a single solar bulb illuminating a vast dark warehouse. Everything was still dusty and dark and hard to discern. But the boxes closest to him, puzzle-piece silhouettes of all shapes and sizes, were starting to make sense.

_Chase me. Catch me. Make me._

The way Yondu reclined luxuriantly beneath him, yet twisted towards the airlock. The too-quick breaths that rasped past the knife at his windpipe, and the way his jagged teeth, broken as a boxer's, kept catching on his underlip. And of course, that telling spread of his legs when Kraglin ground _down._ All pieces in a jigsaw that was incomprehensible from a distance, but began to make sense once you got close enough to make out the pattern... Kraglin snorted. The tender skin under Yondu’s ear indented around the knife tip, a blue dimple that threatened to nick. Kraglin didn’t reduce the pressure. Not yet. He hadn’t forgotten what happened last time: Yondu charming him with half-lidded pink eyes and toothy grins, then wrenching his knife away and ramming it to quiver in the porous cartilage-tissue not two inches from Kraglin’s eye. But there was a theory he wanted to test out, and Yondu had given him the perfect opportunity.

“Look at you,” he said, injecting his voice with enough sneer to make Saal proud. “Acting like such a goddam, uh -” He swallowed, well aware that the next word could be his last. Then figured _what the heck;_ if Yondu wanted him dead he would be. “Cocktease. You don’t wanna ride me. You wanna be held down and fucked.”

Yondu’s pupils _exploded,_ like far-away black holes feeding off the matter of a thousand stars. He choked, spit clicking in his windpipe, wrists pulling taut in Kraglin’s grip. But, when Kraglin released them, he didn’t shove him off. He kept them over his head like he’d been cuffed again, face spilling to the side. With one cheek pillowed on his bicep, he didn’t have to watch Kraglin fiddling one-handed with the buckles holding his trenchcoat closed. Kraglin couldn’t have that. He wriggled the knife, and congratulated himself on the growl that resulted.

“Nuh-uh,” he hissed, leaning so his nose brushed a pointed ear. His breath fogged the golden loops pierced through the lobe. Praying to all cosmic entities that he’d played this right, he took one between his teeth and _tugged_ , making Yondu’s jaws clack closed around the hiss. “Eyes on me. Slut.”

He slapped him when he disobeyed. Lightly, wary of what pushing too far might yield - an arrow through the cranium would be far from a perfect end to this day. He needn’t have worried. Yondu inhaled, sharp and shocked in all the best ways. Then rolled his head around the knifepoint to face Kraglin head-on.

The blow had made the tip snip the skin, just a fraction. Navy smeared blue. “Good,” Kraglin said, forcing his voice to remain steady. “Maybe ya ain’t as stupid as you look.”Yondu’s expression soured. Kraglin hastily backtracked. “Not that ya look stupid, just. Uh…” He remembered what had made Yondu jolt before, and angled down onto him, feeling his thighs flex as he took Kraglin’s weight. “Just like a bitch. Right lil’ slut is what you are, ain’t it, Udonta? Wanting a Nova man to come’n put ya in yer place… Bet you been thinking of this since you had me on my knees in the prison. Well, now it’s my turn, yeah? Better say yer prayers now, Udonta - I’mma fuck you so hard you forget ‘em…”

He was letting his mouth run, which was dangerous at the best of times. But Yondu responded so damn well. He rewarded Kraglin’s chatter with grind after grind, rubbing his crotch up against Kraglin’s mindlessly, rough and horny as an animal. It took all of Kraglin’s strength to keep himself from being bucked off. Kraglin wondered how long it’d been - whether Yondu allowed himself to sleep with crew, or whether this close to his self-promotion to the Ravager throne, he didn’t even trust Greenie and Nosering enough to invite them to bed. And among those the captain opened up to, how many got to see _this_ side of him? Needy, desperate, everything a Ravager captain ought not to be? The answer, Kraglin suspected, was very few.

Not that Kraglin could judge. He was just as fervent. His cock squashed against the front of his pants, fluid tacking to fabric from behind. He lowered himself fully on top of Yondu, buckles and straps digging into him as much as his ribcage must be into the Ravager Admiral’s chest. Hooking Yondu’s calves to wrap around his narrow waist, locking them together, Kraglin rolled his hips against him again and again like he was fucking him through the leather.

It wasn’t all bliss. His mind clawed at him, insisting that he slow this down, think this through, before he let himself be lulled into a false sense of security. He’d said that he wouldn’t be tricked again, and he’d meant it. But with Yondu bowing into each thrust, it was so easy to let it go. Give up. _Give in..._  

Hands clawed down his back. Ragged nails caught and pulled on Kraglin’s undershirt, with a frenzy that left scratches even through the material. When they tangled in his hair instead, yanking so hard that pain blared in Kraglin’s brain louder than any siren, Kraglin yelped out loud. Yondu sniggered. Did it again. So Kraglin got his own back. Working cackhandedly between them, he dug his thumb through the leather stretched between Yondu’s asscheeks, to viciously poke at his hole.

“Gonna fuck you here,” he growled, twizzling down on the pucker. “And yer gonna take it, and know it were a _Nova Corpsman_ who gave it to ya…” Their state of undress - or lack thereof - made it difficult to locate; there was the thick zip seam to contend with, as well as Yondu’s wriggling. But Kraglin managed to make enough of an impression that Yondu froze.

Ooh. Sensitive. Kraglin _liked_ it. He rotated his thumb again, rougher, testing the tight-clamped pinch...

Yondu banged his heel off his kidney, eyes popping wide. “Quit it!”

Whoops. Perhaps he’d read that one wrong - although he had no clue _how_. Talk about mixed signals. Kraglin shuffled onto his elbows, bright red in the face. He forced himself to look contrite rather than frustrated. “Uh, sorry. Think I got a bit carried away. We don’t gotta if you don’t wanna -”

“Not that!” Yondu’s palm smacked into his mouth, squeezing his jaws closed in what was either the most forceful _shut up_ Kraglin’d ever been victim of, or an attempt to crush his skull. He rested one finger on his own lips. Then pointedly nodded at the door.

“In here, you say?” rumbled a voice. It took Kraglin a second too long to place it - although he could be excused, most of his bloodflow having been diverted below the belt.

“Yessir! One skinny whitey, one redcoat blue with a bag on ‘is head.” A giggle. “Still couldn’t get nothin’ from his pocketses.”

Shit. The streetgirl and Czar.

Kraglin and Yondu’s wide eyes met. They stayed petrified a moment longer, the only movement the too-rapid rise and fall of their chests. Then the reality of their situation sunk in. They were on the floor, hot and sweaty, sandwiched together, pre-cum cooling in their clothes and lips very obviously freshly-bitten. And they were about to be discovered.

The leg around his waist tightened, “Hit me!” Yondu hissed.

“Cap’n?” The crunch of booted feet up the gangway. “You in there?”

Kraglin goggled at him. “What?”

“Cap’n, I’m coming in!”

“I said hit me, dammit!”

“Stand back from the door…”

Yondu lost patience while Kraglin was still recovering from the whiplash in mood, his deflating cock not feeding blood into his system nearly fast enough to keep his brain up to speed. Not that that made the pain any less of a shock. A fist mashed his face, crunching his lower jaw so far to the side it crikked.

Kraglin tumbled, Yondu still latched onto his waist and rolling with him. A boot to the solar plexus got them separated, and by then Kraglin’s fight-or-flight instinct had taken over. It decided on the former. As Yondu lurched to his knees, making to grapple Kraglin and let his weight advantage do the talking, Kraglin bared his bloodied teeth and _lunged._

 

* * *

 

 Czar’s fist left a neat hole in the doorframe, well and truly banishing the term ‘space-worthy’ from this old wreck’s ship-specs. “Captain!” he roared.

Yondu popped up, face filling the gap like a portrait in a frame. “‘Sup?” he greeted. Sniffed blood back up his nose. What? Kraglin had gotten in a lucky shot. “Took ya long enough to find me.”

“We’ve combed the entire flarkin’ giant head; sorry if ya happened to be in the last fucking place we looked. Perhaps if you hadn’t _run away,_ this wouldn’t have happened in the first place -” Czar cut himself off when Yondu started mouthing along, miming his wagging mouth with his hand as if he was in deep conversation with a sock-puppet. “Boss,” he said, heavily. Reached through the hole and cranked the manual release on the doorlock. “Just take this a bit more seriously. That’s all I ask. You’re Admiral now, an’ you gotta act like it. No sleepin’ with nobody who might assassinate ya, no boozin’ unless you got me or Isla by your side, and _definitely_ no...”

His voice trailed off. On the floor behind Yondu sat that pesky gnat of a Nova Officer. He was nursing a black eye and a bust lip - come to think of it, Yondu boasted an unforeseen number of scrapes and bruises too. Czar was used to him mowing down armies without a scratch. This… this was unprecedented. “Why didn’t you whistle?” he snapped, stomping through the doorway. His tree-trunk of a torso seemed to swell, making the cramped space warp around it like it was being viewed through a fishbowl lens. He towered over Kraglin, stooping to sneer at the pinched white face. “Now I gotta snap this one’s neck up close and personal -”

“No you don’t,” said Yondu, perhaps a little too quickly.

“No you don’t,” echoed the Corpsman, straining his reedy chicken-neck away. Czar couldn’t help but notice his bright red face, and how fast he was breathing. It could be panic. It could be exertion. Or it could be something else entirely. Groaning, Czar turned his back on the scrawny Corpsman, and advanced on his captain instead.

“Tell me you didn’t.”

Yondu affected innocence. Hard, with a face that grizzled, but he managed. “Didn’t what? Czar, honeybunch, we’ve talked about this; you gotta be more specific...”

“Tell me you didn’t fuck him,” said Czar shortly, before Yondu could segue into an ever-escalating bout of petnames-come-insults. He closed the gap between them until Yondu was nose-to-pectoral with a leatherclad chest, and scoured his face for the lie.

Yondu grinned, blithe and bright. “Can safely say I didn’t do that.” Czar scanned him through squinted eyes. He took in his bruised mouth, which looked suspiciously _bitten_ rather than just punch-swollen, and the cuffs dangling forlornly from the pipe in the ship’s main hold.

Questioning the cap’n’s orders rarely went well for anyone, regardless of whether you’d been friends since you first donned the reds. Czar contemplated testing his luck. Then - wisely - decided he’d rather survive to see Knowhere’s greasy dawn. “I’ll see you back on ship then sir,” he said. “And as for _you…_ ” Kraglin quailed most satisfyingly. “You had better be offworld by the time our half of Knowhere faces the quasar. Or else…”

A finger across his throat elaborated. Kraglin gulped. “Read ya loud and clear, big guy. Uh. Udonta. Don’t think this is the end.”

“I’ll see ya round, kid,” Yondu said. Czar snorted.

“No you won’t. Corpsmen are smarter than that.” But neither he nor Kraglin looked convinced.

 

* * *

 

 Suffice to say, Kraglin missed the rendezvous. It was with a heavy heart that he made his way back into Nova space, no prize in his pocket, no Udonta led behind him in chains. (Not that Yondu would ever submit to such treatment, Kraglin decided. He was a fighter through and through. He’d bite and swing and thrash until they tasered him, just to prove he wasn’t going willingly.) All he could think, as his transport chugged into dock, was that Saal had been right. Every single one of those off-hand comments, those snide jabs and side-eyes and thoughts never quite vocalized, because they were inscribed deep into the conscience of all species unlucky enough to call themselves part of the Nova empire... All true.

_Stupid little Hraxian. You’re never going to amount to anything._

Kraglin shuddered. He didn’t need to see Saal’s sneer to imagine the words. But see it he did - as soon as he stepped off the transport, in fact.

Saal had come to greet him. He was part of the welcoming committee, one among seven blue-clad Corpsmen with over-the-shoulder yellow harnesses and matching glares. One was holding a placard with his name. Kraglin groaned, sighed, and plodded over. Why did this feel like a death march? The worst they could do was chuck him in the Kyln.

Xandar played host to this little shindig. The brightness hurt Kraglin’s eyes, accustomed as they were to either the Hraxian subterranea or the dingy dank atmosphere of Knowhere. He shielded himself with a hand cupped over his brows, squinting at his assailants. Attendants. Retainers. Whatever they were. “The fuck y’all lookin’ at,” he croaked. “I know I took more than my annual leave. But honestly guys, this’s overkill.”

Saal exhaled through his nose. Then pinched it too. “God, Obfonteri. You reek. Have you no shame?”

“Huh?” Kraglin sniffed himself and shrugged. He hadn’t noticed. It was hard to, when everyone around you smelt worse. “Ain’t exactly easy-access showers on Knowhere. Sorry guys.” He perked up. “You could always lemme have a bath before you take me in?”

“Not,” said Saal through gritted teeth, “likely. We are under orders to apprehend you should you set foot on Nova soil - which frankly, I’m amazed you were stupid enough to do.”

“So’m I, friend.” Kraglin reached out to pat his shoulder. He shoved his hand in his pocket when he was met with various iterations of plasma pistol, all bristling and with a glow in their barrels that impended melted faces and years of painful reconstructive surgery. “Uh. Guys. Is all this really necessary?”

“Yes,” said Saal bluntly. And that was that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Remember when I used to write fic for plot rather than just for me? This chapter is so shamefully self-indulgent; I have 0 excuses. Nevertheless, hope you liked it.**


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **In which there is an interrogation, Saal is an asshole, and Kraglin finds a surprise in his room.**

Kraglin had never been interrogated before. He’d been questioned, yes; threatened, many times; even occasionally hauled up against walls and shaken. But despite the numerous petty thefts and acts of vandalism he’d had under his belt before joining the Nova Corps, he’d never done anything serious enough to warrant the full Danger-to-the-Peace treatment. This was a new experience for him. And, as he was discovering, he didn’t like it.

They’d left him alone for an hour on the pretence of ‘fetching coffee’. Kraglin sat at a centerpoint between four convex glass screens, which acted as this room’s walls. They were as black as they were reflective. He couldn’t tell where the observation room was, let alone whether it was occupied - although he suspected it was. There was nothing to do but stew.

Kraglin picked morosely at his cuffs. He tried to convince himself that firstly, his nose wasn’t itching, and secondly, he had made the right choice in flying back to the Nova Corps rather than straight into the nearest sun. However, while his liesmithing skills might be so well-developed that he was tempted to put them on his resume, not even he could con himself.

The Corps were pissed. That much was obvious. Saal hadn’t stopped glaring at him once during the journey over - which was concerning, as he was piloting the shuttle. What Kraglin couldn’t work out was _why_ they hadn’t dragged him before the martial court. They had every right to, if they knew he was the one to send two false tip-offs, and that he’d spent his three weeks of annual leave fraternizing with (read: almost-fucking) the enemy.

...Although by Thanos, Kraglin prayed they didn’t know about that.

It was only when the officer in charge of his questioning entered that the wheels in Kraglin’s head began to turn.

“You’re not Customs and Excise,” he breathed, leaning in as far as the chair-mounted cuffs would allow. He looked the young woman over, who was Halsey’s twin in every way bar the short-cropped crimson hair. And, of course, the back-brace. That was latched onto her neck with sucky-pads, which sparked and sputtered as the integrated mechanics forced her legs to move through a jerking, automaton walk-cycle. “You’re the flarking Fugitive Taskforce.”

“And you,” responded Quenvi, sitting with an audible creak, “are Kraglin Obfonteri. Hraxian, Nova private of three years. Yes?” She shuffled her spartan stack of data-pads onto the desk.

No sense denying it. Kraglin nodded along. He forced down the blink as the three-dimensional facial recognition scanner mapped the contours of his features, confirming his identity. This was a test. It was all a test. He couldn’t crane around far enough to see the monitor, not with his high chairback and the wrist cuffs. But he’d wager it was there. The electrodes gummed across his forehead and cheekbones, and the faint hum of working systems from behind him, only noticeable when he was alone in the room, kinda gave the game away. Sure enough, Quenvi’s eyes flicked above his head, scanning a read-out only she could see. Making an assessing noise, she scribbled a note on an encoded holographic data-relay, projected from one of the pads. The swirling sigils made even less sense to Kraglin than this situation at large. He watched her through them, focusing on her expression, trying to unearth anything that might give him an edge. What he found - a woman committed to capturing her mark - didn’t fill him with relief. He _hated_ Corpsmen who were in it for the right reasons, for the sake of justice and righteousness and all that shit. Loyalty that couldn’t be bought? Ugh. It made bile creep up his throat.

“Now Obfonteri,” Quenvi said, once she'd finished tapping. “Tell me about the first time you met Udonta.”

“Corpsman Quenvi!”

Saal. The boom of his voice was sudden yet unsurprising. Kraglin had wagered he’d be watching, and it was only natural that the Corps kit this place out with all sorts of gadgetry: hidden cameras and microphones and the like. He didn’t flinch, and was proud of it. What was surprising was Quenvi’s reaction. She bounced upright as fast as her mechanized legs could carry her. She was flushing - and damn, it was odd to see that familiar, Halsey-like face reflecting an emotion other than anger (or lust, or the sadistic desire to shred Kraglin’s skin from his bones). “Sir!”

“You will stick to the script, or I will come in there and read the questions myself. Are we understood?”

“But sir, I -”

“No buts! Your personal theories on this matter have no bearing here.” A long and nasal sigh sounded, during which Quenvi’s jerky attention-position began to spasm. Then the mic clicked off. Kraglin held his breath. He counted to five, before a panel whooshed open in one of the walls. Saal stomped through, waving Quenvi irritably away. “Take my post.”

“Yessir.”

“And be sharp about it!”

Quenvi winced. She shut her eyes until her leg stopped ticking, wobbling the table as her knee banged the underside. “I. Am trying. Very hard, sir.”

A-hole or otherwise, Saal wasn’t one hundred percent a dick. Sighing, he scraped the chair out from behind her, removing the obstacle from her path. “In your own time then, private.”

Quenvi gathered herself. Breathed in, breathed out. Concentrated only on walking. She exited the cell in the same jerky, clumsy manner she’d entered it, glaring at her legs with so much focus she almost kicked the doorjamb. And then there were two.

Saal looked down at Kraglin. That wasn’t unusual. Kraglin had borne the same sneer from him every day of their shared working life. What was unusual were the extra stripes around his left bicep, denoting an elevated rank. They turned that sneer into something authoritative rather than merely annoying.

Kraglin nodded to them. “Promoted, huh.”

Saal took his seat. He did so with all the stately control Quenvi lacked, laying his palms flat on the table so his shadow fell directly onto Kraglin’s face, before folding into his chair with that particular slow grace nobles perfected. Fine-tuned hamstring strength must be bred into them at a genetic level. “So it would seem.”

“Yer a Denaarian now. Boss of the Fugitive Taskforce.” Kraglin squinted at Saal’s figure, silhouetted as it was against the harsh interrogation light. “Why’d ya take this gig? I figured you’d go into politics.”

“The man uses _my_ hair, _my_ recorded voice, to gain access to the archives and you ask me that?” Saal cut himself off with a sharp scoff. “Obfonteri. I am asking the questions.”

Best not to argue. Kraglin nodded along - until Saal made his first statement. ‘Accusation’ would be more apt. “You have been conspiring with Udonta since the beginning,” he intoned, not even pretending his gaze was on Kraglin's face rather than the monitor. “The two of you are Kree sympathizers. Your aim is to eradicate Xandarian culture -” He didn’t say _my culture;_ but then again, he didn’t really need to. This was personal, alright. Not that mister hoity-toity up-his-own-ass-professional would ever acknowledge it. “-To scupper the Nova Corps’ peaceful reign over this quadrant, and - I’m sorry, Obfonteri. Is something amusing?”

Gallows humor, perhaps. Kraglin shook his head and stifled his grin. “Just that… Well. It ain’t nothin’ so complicated. Him and me? We kinda have a thing.”

Saal’s raised brow climbed higher. “A thing.”

Ah, fuck. Wasn’t not keeping his mouth shut what got him entangled in this mess?

“It sounds stupid when you say it, sir…” Kraglin trailed off, formulating his words before he said them. "I've just run into him a couple times too many for coincidence. He seems to get some sorta amusement outta pissing me off." Or humiliating him in front of his peers. Or buying drinks in his name after Kraglin had tracked him to a dirtbag bar, then sending them to the biggest, burliest, meanest looking jackass on tap and scarpering during the ensuing fistfight, laughter echoing mockingly behind him.

Yeah, thought Kraglin, grinning a little despite himself. The guy might be a crook, but at least he was good fun.

“A thing,” repeated Saal, waiting on elaboration. Kraglin gave it to him, albeit half-heartedly, and accompanied by a nervous shrug.

“He runs. And I. I uh, chase him.”

The silence lingered. “You’re saying,” said Saal slowly, “that this is a two-way game?”

Kraglin frowned. “I’m not sure I understand?”

“You chase him because he runs. But he runs because you chase. Perhaps…” Saal rubbed his top lip. The skin was clean-shaven; it looked unnatural to Kraglin’s eyes, acclimatized as they were to seeing month-old chin-fluff glinting from his curved reflection on ship hulls in the Knowhere docks. Saal’s assessment of Kraglin was no longer disparaging. It had become more… Analytical. "Would you let him walk? If you had the chance?” His eyes settled on Kraglin’s throat as it bobbed around a gulp. Because Kraglin hadn’t been _considering it._ Totally not. Nuh-uh. When he pinned Yondu to the deck and fucked between his legs in vicious stabs, nails biting the ravager’s ass through the leather and dragging him tight to his crotch, he’d obviously been distracting the guy to make it easier to slip him back into cuffs. If Czar hadn’t interrupted, Yondu’d be wallowing in the Kyln already.

Kraglin wondered if that’d sound any more believable to Saal than it did to him. He opted for a nod instead: short, sharp, fierce. There was no furious pleeping from the monitor. Whatever brainwaves it was reading, they hadn’t given Kraglin away. Which was damned miraculous - but then again, wanting to keep someone to yourself wasn’t quite the same as _letting them walk,_ was it?

Saal still felt the need to reiterate his point. He bent towards Kraglin, cold minty breath smacking him like he’d walked into an icy lamppost. “If you had the chance to bring him in - the resources… You’re telling me that you wouldn’t let him go so that this _game_ of yours could continue?”

The thing about rhetorical phrasing was, your answer could be taken both ways. When Kraglin cracked open his dry mouth and said “No sir,” it wasn’t in agreement. But it also wasn’t a lie. And, as the machine didn’t dob him in, Saal could take it any way he pleased.

 

* * *

 

Thus the life of Kraglin-the-undercover-cop ended, and the life of Kraglin-the-taskforce-agent began. Or rather, the double agent. Looking at the flesh-colored pressure pad, which was to be worn on the inside of his left bicep where it was unlikely to be agitated accidentally, Kraglin couldn’t help but suspect he’d been used. “So I’m supposed to... what. Go hunt him down again? Do you guys's legwork?”

“No. You’re bait; let him come to you.” At least Saal was blunt about it. He didn’t bandy around issues; Kraglin could respect that in a man. He could still hate that man’s guts and wish him to a level of hell populated solely by moombas - but that was besides the point. “You can’t be associated with us. Not officially, not publicly, not in any way but through this.” He laid the pad on the specially-shaved patch of Kraglin’s arm. The adhesive softened, activated by his bodyheat. Kraglin pulled a face as Saal gave it a testing tug and found it had well and truly grafted. “For now, we send you back to Vice. And as soon as you hear from Udonta - as soon as you so much as see blue out of the corner of your eye - you press that button and call down the garrison. Do you understand?” It’d be hard not to. Kraglin shucked on his stained old jacket in response, stuffing scrawny arms back into the sleeves. Saal leaned away, trying not to inhale. “And for Prime’s sake. Get yourself a shower before reporting back to barracks.”

“I’m already late from my holiday.” Kraglin hunched so his shoulders filled out the well-worn material, collar brushing his stubbly jaw. “What’m I supposed to tell ‘em - I got waylaid by customs?”

“No.” Saal sneered - although that could just be his resting face; Kraglin hadn't experienced enough of his other expressions to tell. “You are a Hraxian; they already expect remarkably little of you. I’m sure you can conjure up some lie or another.”

“But what if I get punishment detail? What if they make me clean the bog blocks?”

“Then,” said Saal, raising to his feet with the rustle of a sleekly tailored uniform, “you wield that plunger with pride, Corpsman. Dismissed.”

The cuffs had been dismantled while they attached the beacon. At Saal’s word they retracted completely, flattening into the chair, the only hints of their existence a slight irregularity. Kraglin winced as he yanked off the electrodes. They were gummed to his forehead in a half-moon, and the little blobs of gel took some rubbing to remove. But remove them he did, just as he removed his bony ass from the chair and his bony body from the building. He took a furtive look-around to make sure no one had seen him exiting the structure, which was designated for use by the Nova Forces’ numerous specialized taskforces. Once assured that his new occupation was a secret - or that anyone spying on him had the decency to be subtle - Kraglin turned on his heel and sloped for the barracks at the complex’s far side.

Home sweet home. He couldn’t wait.

 

* * *

  

He wasn’t sure if Yondu’s presence added to or detracted from his decor. It was incongruous, certainly. Disregarding the man lounging on Kraglin’s bed, the room actually looked to be of a cleanliness standard that approached military, if only because there was so little clutter to gather dust. Kraglin had to rub his eyes to make sure this wasn’t a hallucination, following a long and frazzling day. But when he opened them, they reported much the same image.

Blue face. Red coat. Grin that might be charming if it wasn’t so yellowed and metallic, but which managed an ugly suave.

Yondu was there. Judging by the smoking stub of a cheroot on the table and the smashed fire alarm, he had been for some while.

Kraglin groaned. He was intimately aware of the button in his sleeve, under which sweat seemed to catch and clag. But he didn’t reach for it. Not yet. “You're a wanted man.”

“Mm-hmm.” Yondu lifted his second cheroot. Took a slow drag. Then coughed, smoke whuffing from his throat, eyes redder than normal. “How the fuck do you inhale this shit?”

“I should call the garrison.” Kraglin took a step towards the door. “And uh. Hraxians are kinda adapted special. All that air pollution, y'know?”

Yondu spotted his hand creeping for his knife sheath - empty though it was, the blade having been confiscated when Kraglin submitted to the taskforce's custody. He wondered if he’d get it back. Probably not - unlicensed weaponry wasn’t exactly smiled upon in Nova circles. The only reason Saal hadn’t brought it up was so he could hold it over Kraglin’s head if he required blackmail material at a later date.

Yondu didn’t know that though. He whistled, a high clear note. The arrow shot from his belt, weaving a spinning, cartwheeling, cantering dance around their heads. Its path seemed almost arbitrary, divorced from the steady whistle and the sedate glow of Yondu’s implant. Kraglin cringed when it darted nearby. But the trail of red-gold radiation didn’t cut. It made his skin tingle oddly, like he was being rubbed by a staticky balloon, yet - ignoring what the arrow could do to him, if Yondu so desired - it wasn’t all that bad. Satisfied he wasn't going to pull a runner, Yondu guided it back to its harness. He pushed to sit crosslegged as it jittered to rest, stroking the carved fletching. Grime from his boot-treads sprinkled Kraglin’s sheets. “Nuh-uh,” he said, wagging a finger. “You’re hearin’ me out. Y’see, Kraggles, I’m an Admiral now. I got me _responsibilities_ an’ shit, and sometimes… Well, sometimes a captain finds himself in need of a mate.”

Kraglin found his sightline honing on Yondu’s crotch, almost against his will. Almost. “Are we talking like, sexually?”

Yondu was far from offended, if his smirk was any indication. His knees fell open, presenting the zipper that joined the front of his pants to the back like a delicacy on a dirty leather plate. “A first mate,” he specified, watching Kraglin’s reaction from hooded eyes.

Suddenly everything made perfect, horrible sense.

“Fuck. You're recruiting me?” He didn’t bother to ask how Yondu’d gotten in here, or who he’d threatened/blackmailed/outright murdered to get his way. Better to plead ignorance on some things.

Yondu's smile didn't waver. If anything, it grew at Kraglin's discomfort. He stretched – a motion that would look casual if it weren't so damn calculated; if his slivered red eyes didn't keep careful watch on Kraglin to monitor the flaring heat in his cheeks, the swell in his groin. “Mm-hm. You gonna come now? Or do I gotta sweeten the deal? Cause m’fraid to tell ya that there won’t be no nookie-nookie once you’re initiated. We're gonna be far too busy, for one. Lotsa places to rob, people to cheat, ships to scupper an' steal.”

“I... Uh...” Oh God. Kraglin didn't need to be put on the spot; Kraglin needed ten minutes alone with a dark corner and a paper bag to hyperventilate into. He ought to laugh at Yondu's audacity. Slam the buzzer, summon the garrison, and watch as they hauled him away. That would be the sensible thing to do. Not stand stock still, gawping like a stuck pig. Definitely not contemplate Yondu's offer.

Kraglin was, he had to admit, a little flattered. It'd be hard not to be. For a guy like Udonta to headhunt him, ahead of his most trusted cronies? Kraglin'd evidently made a fine job of faux-fucking him. But none of this changed the fact that a employment proposition from a criminal was dangerous - not to mention very, very illegal.

“Do I, like, gotta fill out an application form?” he asked faintly. “Are there – I dunno – try-outs? Because I ain't wrestling yer big green goon for the privilege. He'd snap me like a toothpick.”

Yondu treated him to a hearty guffaw. He seemed delighted by Kraglin's shock – of course he did; the man probably scared little old ladies for fun. “Don'tchu worry about none of that,” he said, rolling onto his belly, weight on his elbows with chin propped on hands. “I'm choosin' you. Crew can like it or lump it. I'm their boss; I tell 'em what to do.” And dammit, but this was a serious discussion. Did they really have to have it while Yondu was reclining on his bed? Kraglin battled down the warmth in his groin with the thought of himself and Yondu, stewing together in the Ravager cookpot.

“Yeah right,” he croaked, one knee pressed to the bunkpost to steady himself. Dammit, when had he gotten so close? “I know how these things work. Cap'n ya might be -”

“Admiral,” Yondu corrected.

“-But at the end of the day, it's the crew what decides who lives an' who dies. I dunno about you, but I reckon a Nova Corpsman for a first mate might just tip the odds outta your favor. Especially if we ever...” A waved hand elucidated. “Y’know.”

Yondu’s smirk didn’t decrease in wattage. He swung himself to the edge of the bed, legs falling mercifully shut. “Like I said, once yer name’s in the roster, you’re off-limits as far as invites to my cabin go. Not that I’ve ever been one for following rules - but anyway. Kraggles, all this tells me is that yer considerin’ my offer. Let’s say I give ya tonight to mull it over? We’ll be leavin’ port tomorrow, back again in a lunar-cycle. Plenty of time for you to weigh up the pros n’cons. And come find me, if ya actually do wanna screw.” Speech delivered, Yondu pushed to stand. He flexed a pop from his spine, propping both hands on the small of his back and arching like he was working out a kink.

“Long day?” was all Kraglin could think of to say, before he could be accused of staring. Yondu looked surprised - but only for a moment.

“The longest. I crawled through a helluva lot of vents to get here. Managed to catch some shut-eye before you deigned to show yer stupid face though, so I can thank ya for that, at least.” He frowned, as if a thought was only just occurring. “Hey, what took ya so damn long anyway? You off powdering yer nose, Obfonteri?”

Great. He’d slept on his bed. _Without him._ Was it insane to feel jealous of pillows? Most likely - but if there was one thing this whole messed-up situation proved, it was that Kraglin was very far from textbook definition of psychological health.

But Yondu had asked a question, and questions demanded answers. Kraglin couldn't very well say that he’d been off conspiring with the taskforce assigned to Yondu’s capture. He bit his lips to give him an excuse to keep them closed, and opted for a noncommittal shrug. Yondu looked at him closely for a long minute. Then barrelled on, cheer snapping back onto his face with all the force of a high-speed collision in zero gravity.

“So of course, now I’m in I gotta get out. And I don’t fancy the vents again - once was more than enough, and the Corps’ll get wise if I keep sneakin’ in and out that way. So Kraggles, tell me. You got a bolt-hole lurkin’ round these parts, or do I gotta hold you hostage and do this the old fashioned way?”

“You mean you don’t have a plan?”

“Who the fuck d’you think I am? _Plan_? Me? I’m fuckin’ offended.” A pause, while Kraglin assessed Yondu’s grin and noted that the visual didn't match the report. “Hey, I'm cryin’ on the inside.”

 _Liar,_ Kraglin wanted to accuse. _You always have something up your sleeve._ But he supposed that when you were in the space pirating business, being underestimated could work to your advantage. “I still don’t know why you think I’d help you,” he said instead, and was treated to the slow, spreading yellow magnificence that was Yondu’s smirk. It was one of his filthier ones - bordering a leer, dimpled at the edges. Kraglin couldn’t help but react to it. He drew himself straighter, clearing his throat as Yondu draped himself forwards over the bed. His crawl to the edge of it was more a stalk. Kraglin certainly felt like prey as the Ravager stood, sizing him up with lowlidded pink eyes.

“I ain’t gonna answer that one for ya, Kraggles,” he purred. “But…” He reached out. Kraglin didn’t stop him. He relished the hand that cupped his stubble, rolling around his face - before fastening with the speed of a viper in his mohawk. It yanked. Kraglin _squawked._ “Unfortunately, I don’t got time to play today. Old fashioned way it is - just don’t say I didn’t warn ya.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Please-please-please leave comments - they mean the world.**


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **In which Yondu is angry, Kraglin poops, and Quenvi isn't paid nearly enough to deal with this**

“Why didn’t you press the alarm when you first found Udonta in your quarters?”

The interrogation lights were starting to hurt his eyes. Kraglin hoped his squint wasn’t mistaken for a glare - although, had he the choice, he would very much like to be glaring right now. How could an officer of the Nova Corps even _think_ to question him, after such a traumatic experience? Well, this was Saal. Kraglin couldn’t claim to be _surprised._ But it would’ve been nice to have a few minutes to himself, in between being used as Udonta’s meatshield and dragged before the task-squad.

Kraglin shrugged, trying not to look overly defensive. “Hey, yer the one who put it on my inner arm. How’m I supposed to wriggle my hand up my sleeve without him noticin’? He’d have whistled there and then.”

There. Succinct, to the point, impossible to disprove. Except for the sweat that gathered around Kraglin’s armpits, staining his shirt with dark rings. And the lie detector, of course. Kraglin flinched as it activated, peeping like a stomped bird. His wrists pulled taut in the cuffs. The edges bit into his hands. Behind Saal, diligently making notes on a data-jotter, Lieutenant Quenvi winced. She was evidently of a more nurturing nature than her sister - and, Kraglin was relieved to find, a less vindictive one. “Sir,” she said reproachfully, as Saal made a quiet ‘aha’ and scrawled what was no doubt another black mark besides Kraglin’s name. “He’s nervous, he’s tired. He’s just had an arrow at his throat and half the guns in the squadron turned on him. His baseline’s all out of whack - the results aren’t anywhere near conclusive.”

“You’re saying we won’t get anything useful out of him?” Saal sighed, but scraped back his chair and stood, gesturing for the cuffs to unfold. “Very well. Obfonteri, we reconvene at first-sunrise. Quenvi will be guarding your door tonight, in case you get cold feet.” Quenvi didn’t argue, but she did shoot Kraglin an apologetic look.

“It’s just protocol,” she explained. Saal’s sour sneer said otherwise. Of course, Saal being Saal, he had to verbalize this as well:

“No. This is in case our double agent friend isn’t as loyal to the Nova star as he’s pretending. Which I highly doubt, given who, and _what,_ he is.” He drew himself up to his full height, looking down his nose at the gaunt Hraxian, who remained bowed in his seat. “Make no mistake, Obfonteri. We will catch Yondu, with or without you. The only variable is whether or not you enter the Kyln by his side.”

Quenvi tutted. “Sir -”

“If you wish to file a formal complaint about my conduct, you know the appropriate channels,” Saal told her. To Kraglin, he gave one last sneer and a scoff, as if to say _you aren’t worth the time it’ll take to chaperone you to your quarters._ “Come along then, Hraxian. Hurry up. You need sleep.”

Kraglin couldn’t deny it. He half-walked, half-stumbled behind Saal, pouring into the lift besides him and collapsing against the rear wall. There was a new cut on his cheek, where the blaster bolt had flashed by close enough to scorch. He hadn’t been allowed to see medical, as none of his injuries were life-threatening, and with his luck it’d scar. The sides of the slice stung. It gaped too wide to be pinned with butterfly bandages - Kraglin’d need to steal a reel of gauze from the medicabinet in the locker rooms. But right now, all he wanted was rest.

Saal dropped him and his guard off at the door without another word. Quenvi, taking one look at Kraglin’s tottering passage, rushed to assist him. Kraglin elbowed her away.

“Fuck off and keep watch like a good girl, would ya?” Last thing he needed was for Saal to accuse him of grabbing her tit. Quenvi got the message. She backed away, hands upraised, and took her station. Every so often a nervous blue face would peep at him through his room’s porthole window - the usual shutter had been wound down for the duration of his house arrest. It would be subtle, were it not for the grinding of her exoskeleton’s gears. Kraglin ignored her. Let her look. If he beat one off, it’d be her own fool fault for catching an eyeful.

He sat down slowly. He savored it too: from the relative softness of a military mattress, to the shape left by Yondu’s body. He’d marred the outline of Kraglin’s own, which remained visible after three weeks of absence, like the chalk drawn around a corpse in a homicide investigation. Kraglin was the sort of guy who could fall asleep standing up and wake exactly the same way; he engraved the shape of his body into whatever surface he lay on, like a chisel driven into a block of wood. Yondu, judging by the way he’d pancaked this impression, couldn’t be more different.

 _He’s gonna have to be little spoon,_ Kraglin’s mind provided, unbidden. _Just so I can keep hold of the wriggly fucker._

He chastened himself for this thought. But try as he might, he couldn’t deny that he was smiling, as he toed off his boots and crawled up the mattress to fall face-forwards onto his pillow.

It had been a very long day, after all.

 

* * *

 

To say it had gone abysmally would be generous to the Nova Corps. Yondu had dragged Kraglin upright, walking him ahead of him down the corridors with his arrow keeping pace, twizzling an inch from the arteries in Kraglin’s neck. Pistols had bristled on all sides. Kraglin, ears aflame, had spotted Halsey’s face among the crowd. There hadn’t been time to mouth _this ain’t what it looks like._ Especially given that it absolutely was.

“Sorry kid,” Yondu had grunted in his ear, reaching behind himself to smack the elevator button. He hadn’t looked at Kraglin - only out at the sea of hostile faces and dark blue uniforms, gold stars and lapel brasses glinting like cats’ eyes. He was outnumbered. But even if he’d been in the mood for fighting, rather than _alternative options_ \- alternative options that kept Kraglin’s sweaty back sandwiched to the strap-and-buckle-laden frontispiece of Yondu’s coat - Kraglin wouldn’t have bet on the corpsmen’s odds. None of them were young enough to be children anymore. No chance of Yondu going easy on them. Really, it was best for everyone if he cooperated, kept the corpsmen from shooting by standing between them and their prize. It’d stop this getting messy.

Of course, that only worked insofar as the corpsmen didn’t consider him expendable. Kraglin yelped as the shot sizzled past his ear, Yondu rearing back just in time. “Who the fuck-”

He didn’t realize he was bleeding. The plasma bolt hadn’t touched him - thank flark, or he’d be facing some gnarly facial burns, and his bonny good looks would be lost. But it had seared past close enough to open a gash. Kraglin’s blood was so warm that he mistook the trickle rolling down his collar for nervous sweat. Yondu, blinking between him and the scorchmark on the wall, had no such illusions.

“Who did that,” he asked. Quietly, dangerously.

Oh dear. Kraglin craned to the side, mopping red onto the backs of his bony hands. He watched the elevator light, listening for the _ping_ as it migrated from floor to floor, clearly audible in the silence as the Nova Corps shuffled their feet and sheepishly exchanged glances over their raised weapons.

Yondu’s heartbeat was a drumstick, pounding Kraglin’s back. “Who did that?” he roared. “Which one of y’all ugly fuckers -”

Third floor. Fourth floor. Fifth. Kraglin breathed, even and long, ignoring the arrow against his windpipe as best he could. He let the thunder of Yondu’s voice wash over him. The man wanted to posture? Let him get on with it. Kraglin was more concerned with a pragmatic solution. Eighth floor. Ninth. Tenth.

Eleventh floor. As announced by the quiet beep, and the spill of light through the cracks around the doors. Not that anyone noticed this, distracted as they were by the frothing Ravager, whose clenched fists and furious eyes indicated he was a breath away from whistling.

Kraglin tuned in again to Yondu yelling “If whoever did that don’t step forwards, I’ll kill the whole fuckin’ lot of ya!”  When he saw Halsey firming her scowl, hoisting her chin and making to move, Kraglin did the only thing he could. He rammed his elbow into the opening panel, and barged Yondu backwards through the doors. The arrow lurched after them as if it was tethered by an invisible string.

So really, he’d done the Corps a favor. That hadn’t been him facilitating Yondu’s escape - that had been him saving all their sorry lives. The same excuse covered Kraglin ramming the emergency stop button the moment the doors closed and the lift was underway, and yanking the hatch from the ceiling.

“Go,” he’d said, looking everywhere but the heavily-breathing, furious figure before him. “Hurry. There’ll be reinforcements waiting in the foyer, and I know you ain’t in the mood for sparing lives. I don’t want Nova blood on my hands.”

For some reason, Yondu seemed engrossed by the blood sluicing Kraglin’s cheek. Kraglin clapped a hand over the gash, teeth bared against the smart. “C’mon! Go already. You wanted a way out, this is it. No casualties needed.”

Yondu didn’t say anything. But at least that meant he wasn’t arguing. He did however take a step closer to Kraglin - and given that the lift wasn’t the most spacious, that as good as boxed him against the mirrored wall. If Kraglin looked past Yondu, he could see the back of his implant reflected between the two mirrors, a repeated image that receded into infinity. A thousand Yondus reached up to touch his cheek. A thousand Yondus were smacked away.

“Quit it. I already said I ain’t comin’, so don’t you go tryin’ to convince me with none of your damn pelvic sorcer - oh.”

The last word was muffled, as a thousand Kraglins suddenly discovered a thousand blue mouths crushed to their own.

Yep. That had all been for The Greater Good. Now if only Saal would see it that way.

 

* * *

 

And yet, against all odds, while Saal remained very far from _convinced,_ a night’s sleep had been enough to assure him that tossing Kraglin into the Kyln without first capitalizing on his and Yondu’s ‘thing’ would be unwise. Kraglin woke, yawned, winced when that stretched his scalded cheek, and rolled to where Quenvi was pounding on his door: a reveille of fists.

“Five more minutes, love?”

Quenvi’s voice was high and harried. “Apologies Obfonteri! I just received the message from Denaarian Saal, saying he will arrive in quarter of an hour! You must be presentable; make a good impression…”

Kraglin rolled upright. Smacked his sour-tasting lips and scratched his armpit. “Good thing I slept in my clothes then.”

“What?” Quenvi’s expression, visible through the dim glass, veered to disgust. “You also smell like you’ve been wearing those clothes for the past week.”

“Try three.”

“Ugh! There’s a clean uniform outside - do us both a favor and visit the washrooms before he arrives, would you?”

He owed her fuck-all. But clothes that didn't itch _would_ be a novelty. Slouching upright and kicking open the door, he snatched the proffered pile - and ignored how Quenvi’s nose wrinkled, as she caught a waft of _body_ and _sweat_ and _Yondu,_ and flark-knew what else that might’ve accumulated in Kraglin’s pores during his stint on Knowhere. He stomped to the shower block, snapping at Quenvi as he went.

“Dammit girl, you plan on followin’ me all the way?”

“I-I’m not supposed to leave you unsupervised…”

“Well,” said Kraglin, spinning in the doorway of one of the toilet cubicles. He propped his hands on each side, body a lanky cross, and glowered down at her, projecting every ounce of his frustration from the past twenty-four hours into one sizzling glare. “I’m takin’ a shit. You’re welcome to watch, if you wanna. Or you can just sit out here an’ listen. Be my fuckin’ guest.”

Quenvi, turning pale, creaked back a pace. For some reason, there wasn’t much conversation after that.

Kraglin swung himself into the cubicle. He slammed the door shut without catching himself or banging his elbows on the walls - in itself a small miracle - and plonked his bony ass on the cistern, boots scuffing the seat. The clean uniform he gathered up, kneading the starchy fabric between his fingers, pressing it to his face and inhaling the artificial sweetness of laundry detergent. “Fuck my life,” he grumbled.

 

* * *

 

His life remained unfucked, despite all pleas to the contrary. After that incident - which had seen Kraglin facing down the unfriendly end of the arrow (again) he didn’t see Yondu for a fortnight. Which was for the best, considering that Saal decided to change tactics.

“If he’ll come to you,” he explained, as he led Kraglin into the bar they had kitted out with cameras, hidden forcefields, surprise bolt-holes, and even a fucking wall-mounted laser gun, “Then I say we bloody well make the most of it.”

  
Kraglin didn’t know what tipped Yondu off to the set-up; whether it was the hustle and bustle of Nova forces as they strong-armed the owner into compliance and shifted in their equipment, or if Yondu had his ears to the ground and Nova operatives in his pocket, and was keeping track of their activities from the inside. Kraglin certainly had nothing to do with it. Quenvi remained as his personal escort, swapping out her shifts only so that Saal might lour at him in her stead. He wasn’t allowed access to the holonet. He wasn’t allowed a piss-break without armed escort. He definitely wasn’t allowed to write ‘It’s a fucking trap; stay away’ on his bedsheets and dangle them out his window (Kraglin was too smart to attempt the last one, although after his third swig of swizzler he considered it).

Really, his only option was to sit tight, cross his fingers that Yondu didn’t care enough to compromise himself for an ugly Hraxian he’d kissed in an elevator, and wait for Saal to lose interest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Only one chapter left! Leave me some comments, people?**


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **In which Kraglin goes to jail, Yondu destroys sirens, and we all get our happy ending.**

Saal, ever-determined to make his life a misery, decided now would be a good time to channel the tenacity of a bloodhound. Kraglin sat in that bar every night for two weeks.

“This’s stupid,” he declared on the fifteenth day, after he’d swigged his way through his nightly tab. The bartender, whose trust was ensured through generous donations to his tip jar, grunted. Kraglin raised his voice, loud enough for the undercover operatives posing as patrons to hear. “This’s stupid! You really think he’s gonna fall for this?”

“Obfonteri,” snapped Saal in his ear. “You are compromising our operation -”

“Your operation ain’t goin’ nowhere! You’d have better luck arrestin’ me and waiting for him to come to my stars-damned fuckin’ rescue!” Kraglin slammed his drink on the table. It would’ve been hard enough to crack, were the glass not made of reinforced fiber-crystal, strong enough to withstand plasma blasts, atmospheric re-entry, and being hurled at skulls belonging to species of all densities up to and including Kronan. As it was, all he got for his efforts was a sore hand and a splashed sleeve. “I fuckin’ hate this,” he said lowly. “I hate everything about it. I hate yer lousy, dumbass plans, and yer snooty stuck-up face. And I hate - wait. Why ain’t you tellin’ me off for cussin’ over the comm?”

Saal had gone disturbingly quiet. Kraglin had no visual connection - he’d drawn the line at the Corps injecting a camera feed into each eyeball. But he imagined that sour cunt leaning over his desk, fists balled so hard that the knuckles dented his holopads. For the minute it took Saal to compose his reply, Kraglin savored that image, proud that he’d pissed the man off to the extent that their usual snarking couldn't rupture the tension.

Then Saal spoke. “Dammit, Obfonteri. I’m afraid you might be right.”

“What?” Kraglin frowned, pouring over the past five minutes in his head. His brain was pleasantly bloated, thoughts swimmy around the edges. As a result, it only clicked what Saal was on about when the nearest undercover agent, alerted to his altered orders by the comm implant in his eardrum, dove him to the floor.

His head cracked cold chrome. Booze soaked his front. The weight of the man hit him like a grand piano dropped from height. Kraglin was steam-rollered, wind knocked out of him to the extent that he could barely squeeze out a breathy “Fuck!”

“Kraglin Obfonteri,” Saal intoned, as dry as if he was reading the weather. “You have the right to remain silent - and I do suggest you use it.”

 

* * *

 

Kraglin hadn’t set foot in a holding cell since he was fourteen. They hadn’t improved much in the interim. Same crummy lights, which flickered every time a prisoner further down the block rammed themselves against their repulsion-field and got blasted into the cell’s far wall. Same uncomfortable benches that left the shape of their slats ingrained on your backside - or, if you were like Kraglin and had no bodyfat to spare, on your bones themselves. Same smell: blocked drains and unwashed bodies, poorly disguised by the acrid tang of antiseptic.

“Is this really necessary?” he asked. His cell wasn’t outfitted with a forcefield, meaning he could get close enough to wrap thin fingers around the bars. He put this to use as Saal paraded past for the fifth time, under the pretext of making sure Udonta hadn’t bust through the ceiling and made off with him yet. Kraglin suspected it was actually to mock him. “C’mon, man. What’ve I ever done to you?”

Like Saal needed a reason. Kraglin’s mere existence was an affront. He was Hraxian. He was rude. He looked scruffy at the best of times, what with the beard and the raggedly trimmed mohawk, and his presence was always accompanied by the faint but pervasive whiff of cheroot. Add to that that he’d gotten closer to Yondu than Saal ever had, with all his pompous insistence on things being done _the proper way_ and his Nova-funded, Prime-backed taskforce? Saal was more Kraglin’s nemesis than Yondu was.

No, that wasn’t strictly true. Kraglin _liked_ having a nemesis. It did wonders for the morning routine. It gave him a reason to get out of bed, and a focus for his day. And when his hard work had paid off and he had Yondu cornered in a dark alleyway, and rather than laughing or pleading or cowering, Yondu stalked forwards, all red eyes and crooked bared teeth, and told him Kraglin didn’t want to catch him, he wanted to _fuck_ him, Kraglin found himself hard-pressed to deny it.

There was none of that snapping, sizzling energy with Saal, simmering forever on the cusp of the boil. Only icy disdain. Kraglin loathed it.

“Look buddy,” he said. “I don’t know where you get off on all this. I don’t know what your game is. But don’t ya think yer treatin’ me a bit unfairly? These ain’t exactly five-star accommodations, and I ain’t done nothing wrong.”

Saal’s glower informed him that he couldn’t have spoken further from the truth. “You misled the taskforce to Izgrati, you sent out another false call from Knowhere, and you could well have facilitated Udonta’s escape from the Kyln in the first place! An escape during which, need I remind you, he made off with my hair and a recording of my voice, which he then used to access _my family’s_ archives and wipe them from Xandar’s data-core…” The last sentence ran together. Saal stalked closer to Kraglin’s cage as he talked. By the last word he was spitting, lips peeled away from perfectly-aligned teeth, eyes glacial-hard. Kraglin took a hasty step back, expecting an electrified truncheon to catch him in the ribs.

“Woah dude! The fuck’s your problem -”

“I have a son,” growled Saal. “And because of Udonta - because of _me_ \- he may not have a heritage. Do not look down on my fury.”

“As if _I_ could ever look down on _you!_ Ain’t it usually the other way around?”

Saal hissed at that, eyes slitted thinner than a snake’s. “Do not test me, Obfonteri,” was all he said. It was low, sinister, and - as far as Kraglin could tell - 100% genuine. Whatever slip of emotion he'd let loose, Saal quashed it well; his cold and measured countenance returned in full force.

He didn’t consider Kraglin worthy of further bickering. Must have more important things to do - leads to follow, more innocent Hraxians to incarcerate, that sort of thing. He shot Kraglin a last lingering glower, turned smartly on his heel, and walked out. Kraglin waited for the click of his boots to fade before spitting through the bars. He hoped Yondu was leading Saal on a merry fucking goose chase, out to Knowhere and beyond. Let Saal be the one to tramp through grungy puddles of Celestial run-off; Kraglin’d done more than his fair share of legwork with no reward. Perhaps it was time he sat back - best he could on the uncomfortable cell seat - and let someone else bring home the booty.

But try as he might to reassure himself that there was a positive side to this, Kraglin couldn’t help but feel cheated. Was he angry that Saal planned on using the intelligence he’d gathered to comb Yondu’s favourite haunts, while he himself was stuck in jail on the offchance the Ravager Admiral gave enough of a shit about him to swing by? Was it the thought of Saal stealing his credit that ticked him off so intensely? Or rather, was it that Saal might simply… slide into Kraglin’s place?

Having removed him from the scene, Saal had assumed the role of Chief Pursuer. Despite certain things that may or may not have occurred in a crummy, backfiring shuttle in the Knowhere dock, Kraglin was under no illusions as to his and Yondu’s relationship. Yondu didn’t _care_ about him. Not as an individual. Kraglin was a game for him - a challenge. Someone to run from, and then tease and test and trick into chasing him. Anyone could fill that part. Even a frigid cold fish of a Denaarian. Kraglin’s face would simply be swapped out for Saal’s, and then…

And then...

Not even Kraglin’s pent-up state could convince him that the image his mind fed him had any bearing on reality. It was ludicrous; spun entirely from anger and anxiety. But it was so potent (Saal’s hands roving blue skin; his sly smile; Yondu’s wet gasp) that Kraglin couldn’t banish it.

He fumed, chewing over that mental picture like it was cud. He paced from one side of the cell to the other. So Saal planned on leaving him here to rot? Kraglin’d see about that. He might not be some high-flying star-spangled career-corpsman, but he was an ingenious little shit when he needed to be. If Saal wanted to make him an enemy, an enemy Kraglin would become. First though - he needed out of here.

Preferably before Yondu, who’d just sauntered through the door amidst a blaze of alarum, got the pair of them slapped with indefinite sentences, to be lived out in side-by-side cells on the Kyln’s solitary confinement block.

Kraglin threw up his hands. “The fuck are you doing here?”

“Same could be said for you.” Yondu yawned. He didn't seem to care about the siren set into the wall, which was repeating ‘BREACH, BREACH, BREACH’ in an automaton and creepily regular voice. He tilted to get a better look at his reflection in the curved steel bar, and picked something best left unidentified from his teeth. The remains of the last corpsman he captured? Broccoli? Kraglin doubted it - the Ravager Admiral didn’t seem the sort to eat his greens. “They could at least’ve given you a bed. Them pallet things’re hell on yer back.”

“Hell yeah they are,” said Kraglin passionately, before he remembered this whole situation was Yondu’s fault. If he’d only come quietly on Knowhere, rather than fighting back and slipping the cuffs and inviting Kraglin to fuck him, Kraglin could be living the fine life right now. He folded his arms. “I’ll ask again, Udonta. Why are you here?”

Yondu looked affronted. “S’been a fortnight - I said I’d give ya time to think my offer through. Anyway, can’t a guy come visit his buddy?”

“I’m a corpsman. You’re a convicted criminal. We are not, never will be, _buddies._ We’ve been through this -”

“I’m the convict, yet you’re the one behind bars. Go figure.”

Kraglin looked down at himself in his grubby slacks and sweat-stained t-shirt, surrounded by the meager necessities afforded by the Accords for the Humane Treatment of Prisoners. Perhaps there was a grain of truth to Yondu’s jibe. Nevertheless, he managed to argue: “It ain’t what it looks like. Security measures, nothing more. This’s like getting my own office.”

“Your own office,” Yondu drawled. He slanted his eyes at the toilet - a steel pan that folded out of the wall, the closing mechanism for which had fizzled and died the first time Kraglin used at. It now filled his room with intermittent wafts of sulphur, as flushes were cranked further up the pipeline. “Do most Nova offices come with that lil’ doobree? Or do you got a tummy bug?”

Kraglin’s clever riposte was drowned out by the sirens, whose caterwaul graduated from deafening to downright earsplitting. Wincing, Yondu held up a finger. His lips pursed. Kraglin didn’t hear the whistle, but he saw the result - the arrow sailing the length of the penitentiary block to bury itself in the wall-mounted klaxons at either end.

“There!” he shouted as, rather than dying instantly, the sirens began to malfunction, their pitch whining lower like a glitching Merry-go-round. “Finally some peace and quiet!” Beneath that cacophony though, there was the clamor of twenty-odd prisoners all barging bars and forcefields, hollering for help.

“Udonta! Holy shit!”

“Is that really him? I can’t see!”

“Fuck, we’re all gonna die!”

“Nah, he’s only here for the Nova kid…”

“It won’t stop there! He’ll work his way through all of us! We’re next, I tell ya!”

Yondu husked out a heartfelt sigh. He sauntered to the manual disengagement-lock, a computer inset into the wall by Kraglin’s cell. “I’mma bugger off before the idjits guarding this joint work out how to bypass the hack on their systems. But before I go, I’mma open this cell. Hell, I’mma open every cell on this block. Whaddaya say, boys?” He raised his voice. “Wanna be out of here?” At that, the hullaballoo took on a different tone. There was cheering, and stomping, and shouting, and Yondu soaked it up like a ringmaster making his encore.

 _You’re decoys,_ Kraglin wanted to shout, as the prisoners roared their approval. _He's using you. He ain’t your savior._ But, as much as Kraglin hated to admit it, Yondu might just be his.

Yondu accepted the applause with a showman’s modest wave. “And then,” he said, turning back to Kraglin with a wink, “you can choose who you follow. Yer friends down the block. Or me.”

Years later, Kraglin would look back on this moment and wonder what exactly had prompted him to take Yondu up on his offer. Residual frustration with his lot in life - because while he’d played things by-the-book (or as by-the-book as came naturally to a Hraxian) he’d still wound up behind bars? Spite? Lust? An amalgamation of the three? Kraglin was pissed off at Saal - hell, at the Nova Corps in their entirety. He hated their hypocritical blather about ‘bringing peace to the galaxy’ and ‘moving forwards past the brutalities of the colonization period’, as if every crime they’d committed against races like the Hraxians was that easy to sweep into the waste processors. He wanted more than this - being the lackey-slash-whipping-boy of some uptight megalomaniac, appreciated only insofar as he was useful. He knew he was capable of whatever he put his mind to, whether that was rising through the ranks in the Corps or taking on the challenge of becoming Yondu’s second. The tipping factor, when it came down to it, was that life with Yondu promised to be so much more _fun._

And as Yondu was relentless when he set his eyes on something he wanted - whether that something was a new trinket for his dashboard, a scrawny Hraxian, or (a few years down the line and much to Kraglin’s disgust) some wet dweeb of a Terran who did nothing but blast his music and cry over his dead humie carrier - Kraglin figured he might as well cut his losses and head in the direction fate pulled him.

“Alright, you jackass,” he grumbled, as the cell door reeled open with a cranking hydraulic hiss. “You win. It’s you and me against the galaxy.”

“Good,” said Yondu breezily, as if Kraglin had told him how he took his tea. He grabbed his elbow and hustled him along the corridor, after the receding footsteps of Kraglin’s fellow inmates. Behind them, the door dented sharply inwards. Some sort of mechanized battering ram - the wrenching screech echoed in Kraglin’s ears for almost as long as Yondu’s next words. “Because I think I pissed at least half the galaxy off. Get running!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Here we go! Now I can get editing that promised fix-it fic....**
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> **I'm really sorry if this feels rushed. It was, a bit. Last chapters are always the hardest for me to write. I hope I still managed to do this fic justice!**  
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> **Thanks to everyone who's commented on this baby. A lot of work goes into all of my writing, as you can probably tell! If you want to give back, comments are the way to do it (and reccing my fics on other platforms, of course!)**  
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**Author's Note:**

> **This is a little something I've been working on, in between plugging away at a big RP-fic with Redrarebit/Heybucky and scribbling chapters of A Day In The Life. And running the ask-a-ravager tumblr, of course. Let it never be said that I'm not busy.**


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